Works from Bay Area artist Kota Ezawa, who repurposes imagery from news footage and film, will be on display at the Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture (FMCAC) in collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) beginning Jan. 11.
Charged depictions of events and iconic images that are locked in our cultural consciousness are repackaged in Ezawa’s art. In Here and There, Now and Then, he uses his digitally drawn and animated art to revisit recent historical events in San Francisco. Nine of his works will be on display at the former military base in keeping with the Fort Mason Center’s approach to repurposed spaces, and in the process, finding new meaning in history via creativity.
‘The Love Boat’ Lost
The vessel Grand Princess’s progress to the port of Oakland and quarantine during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic is represented in Grand Princess (2024). The drama is reframed by Ezawa as a movie playing at Fort Mason FLIX, the pandemic-era pop-up drive-in movie theater. In this work, the artist commissioned a cover of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” by the Red Room Orchestra featuring Petra Haden, underscoring this now-historical moment’s many tones of anxiety, grief, and dread.
Alcatraz Revisited
American Indians took over Alcatraz Island, claiming it as “Indian Land” from Nov. 20, 1969 to June 11, 1971, a landmark event that brought a great deal of attention to American Indian activism. Ideas of resistance and remembrance play out in Alcatraz Is an Idea (2024). A collaboration with writer and activist Julian Brave NoiseCat, the artwork highlights scenes from 2019’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day Alcatraz Canoe Journey. Indigenous peoples of all nations from the West Coast and beyond participated in this boat journey, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz.
Representing a Classic: Remembering art history and resistance in ‘Merzbau 1, 2, 3’
Merzbau (1923–37) remains one of the most important artworks of the 20th century. After founding a Dada group in Hanover, artist Kurt Schwitters filled his home with approximately 40 sculptural constructions, converting his home into a living cubist-inspired installation he called Merzbau. (“Merz” was Schwitter’s word for collage and “bau” means building.) This accumulating artistic environment was abandoned when the artist fled to Oslo after his work had been included in the Nazi’s 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition. The building was destroyed by Allied air raids in 1943, and Wilhelm Redemann’s photographs fortunately gave Schwitters’s Merzbau an afterlife as a precursor to postwar and contemporary installation art. In Merzbau 1, 2, 3, Ezawa takes these photographs and digitally reproduces these documents of Schwitters’s lost world in a room installation including three light-boxes, wallpaper, plus a video recreation of Schwitters’s sound poem, Ursonate (2022).
Other Ezawa works on view
Ezawa’s National Anthem (2018/2024) — a single-channel video and vinyl wallpaper — is featured in Count Me In, one of seven related presentations inspired by sports currently on display at SFMOMA. National Anthem is a tribute to San Francisco 49ers then-quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 in silent protest of racial inequality and injustice on and off the football field.
“San Franciscans have lived through extraordinary times — financial boom and bust cycles, wars, global pandemics, cultural upheavals, and struggles for human rights and freedom,” said Frank Smigiel, director of arts programming and partnerships at FMCAC. “Ezawa’s work doesn’t just remind us of these moments; it invites us to see them anew, finding unexpected connections between crisis and creativity, between our past and our possible futures.” Ezawa successfully renders and reshapes our memories of history and shared experiences of resistance.
This exhibition is part of FMCAC’s signature Gallery 308 exhibition series, which presents leading contemporary artists, including Sophie Calle, Janet Cardiff, Joan Jonas, Sir Isaac Julien, Sunny A. Smith, and the late Bonnie Ora Sherk.