Whitney Biennial 2019
May 17–Oct 27, 2019
Kota Ezawa
18
Floor 5 and 6
Born 1969 in Cologne, West Germany
Lives in Oakland, CA
Kota Ezawa’s National Anthem is an animation that depicts NFL football players taking a knee during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Protesting police violence against unarmed Black men, the practice was started in 2016 by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Later Kaepernick filed a grievance against NFL owners for colluding against signing him because of his gesture of protest; he ultimately reached a settlement with the NFL on the matter. The subject of this work—like that of Ezawa’s 2002 animation of O. J. Simpson’s murder trial—encapsulates many issues that the artist has taken up over the years, including celebrity, race, violence, and politics, especially as they intersect in the media.
To make National Anthem, Ezawa repurposed footage of multiple teams, using it as the basis for meticulous, small-scale watercolor paintings that have become the frames of the animation. The process reduces complex imagery to its essence; by removing extraneous elements from the image, the resulting grainy effect suggests archival news footage. At the same time, the unevenly pooled watercolors deliberately make clear the animation’s connection to Ezawa’s individual painted scenes, underscoring the artist’s deliberate process.
National Anthem (Buffalo Bills), 2018
Kota Ezawa, National Anthem (Buffalo Bills), 2018. Watercolor on paper 11 × 16 in. (26.4 × 40.64 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco
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Narrator: Kota Ezawa based this two-minute watercolor animation on television footage of football players taking a knee during the national anthem.
Kota Ezawa: I grew up watching football more like in Europe and I heard national anthems being played before soccer matches, football matches.
Narrator: Kota Ezawa.
Kota Ezawa: And I honestly always thought those were really key moments of these events because normally everything is in motion and this is the moment of stillness before things spring to action. And there's a lot of tension that that I always was fascinated by.
I never felt a connection to this attitude of patriotism. But then there's these national anthem protests, somehow touched something in me where I all of a sudden felt very connected to the U. S. and to what these players were doing.
Narrator: The act of taking a knee was intended to protest police violence against people of color and racialized injustice in the United States.
Kota Ezawa: While I was working on the piece so many things happened in relation to these protests. The instigator of the protest, Colin Kaepernick, was held out of the sport by the league and then he filed a lawsuit that recently got settled. And all of these developments happened while the work on the piece was going on. So the the story that I was working with was changing constantly. And I have a feeling also that the story will change as the piece ages.