Kota Ezawa’s work references images in popular culture, cinema, television, and art history. Through such media as digital animation, slide projections, paper cut-outs, watercolor, lightboxes, and collage, he recontextualizes and distills these iconic images to their most essential form.

By doing so, his work communicates the symbolic power these images have on the collective psyche and underscores a keen understanding of how images shape our experience and memory of events. His works reimagine important historical events investigating their meanings and exploring their social implications and impact on our culture.

Kota Ezawa lives and works in Oakland, California. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY (2022); Baltimore Museum of Art (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (2018); SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM (2017); Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA (2017); Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2015); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2013); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2013); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2009); Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, England (2007); and Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2006). Group exhibitions include Art Lessons, Thyssen Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain (2017); California and the West: Photography from the Campaign for Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2016); Last Year in Marienbad, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic (2016); Screen Play: Life in an Animated World, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2015); Out of the Ordinary, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2013); After Photoshop, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2013); and HERE., Pilara Foundation, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA (2011). He participated in the Whitney Biennial (2019) and the Shanghai Biennale (2004). Ezawa’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; and Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, among others. Ezawa received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award in 2004, a SECA Art Award in 2006, and a Eureka Fellowship in 2010.

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