Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art

This exhibition will bring together new and recent works related to Ezawa’s “The Crime of Art” series, a group of light-boxes and video animations that chronicle some of the most infamous and high profile museum heists in history. At the heart of this exhibition is a series of images that pays homage to the 13 works — including those by Degas, Manet, Rembrandt and Vermeer — stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Ezawa draws from the histories of media, popular culture and art history to create distilled renderings of iconic images. His simplified versions of indelible images remain easily recognizable and potent, the result of a process that illuminates the hold certain images have on their viewers. Working in a range of mediums such as digital animation, slide projections, light boxes, paper cut-outs, collage, print and wood sculptures, Ezawa maintains a keen awareness of how images shape our experience and memory of events.

“Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art” was organized by SITE Santa Fe with the Mead Art Museum.