Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art

The Crime of Art looks at San Francisco-based artist Kota Ezawa’s (born 1969) oeuvre using crime as a lens. The book presents photographs and reproductions from Ezawa’s recent exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York and Amherst featuring remakes of paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In addition, the book draws connections from his current project to other work from the early 2000s to the present that contemplates crime. Among them are his animated films The Simpson Verdict (2002) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2005), as well as his ongoing drawing series The History of Photography Remix, which includes hand-drawn re-creations of historic crime-scene photography. While focusing on a single subject, The Crime of Art brings attention to some of Ezawa’s key projects from the last 15 years, and coincides with a solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe in 2017.