The day before the Super Bowl, the German-Japanese artist Kota Ezawa will screen a two-minute video animation of NFL players taking a knee, all afternoon at the de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara.
The animation, aptly titled National Anthem (2018), documents athletes during the performance of the Star Spangled Banner at the beginning of football games. A recorded string quartet version of the anthem provides the soundtrack. The museum will run the video on loop from noon until 4pm, Saturday. Ezawa will talk at 12:30pm, followed by a reception.
National Anthem is part of a critically-acclaimed series of Ezawa’s works focused on elegant, peaceful protests performed by NFL athletes in response to racial injustice and police brutality. Originally performed by San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016, the gesture inspired other NFL players to use their own stadiums for similar protests until such demonstrations were banned in 2018. First exhibited at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Ezawa’s National Anthem series has appeared from coast to coast.
In an interview with the Whitney Museum, Ezawa explained, “If you stage a protest on such a large platform in front of millions of people, it can only be because you care about the place or the country that you are supposed to represent in this moment.”
Throughout his career, Ezawa has appropriated well-known images from the news, art history and popular culture, recreating them in a signature reductive style and translating them into light boxes, animated videos and works on paper. National Anthem is a stirring and now even more timely body of work that offers a powerful meditation on protest, patriotism, solidarity and hope, especially in the current era when reckless ICE thugs are carrying military-grade weapons, rounding up as many brown people as they can and intentionally inciting violence wherever people disagree with the president’s policies.
At the center of National Anthem is the eponymous video, which draws from broadcast footage of NFL games, especially the watershed moment when Kaepernick took a knee for the first time on Sep. 1, 2016. Other scenes draw from actual footage of players standing with arms linked in solidarity, the empty Tennessee Titans bench, vacated when the team elected not to participate in the national anthem or a few lone helmets plopped down on the bench. In some cases, we see photographers scrambling to capture the scene as the historic moment unfolds.
To produce the work, Ezawa painted more than 200 meticulous, small-scale watercolor paintings that form the individual frames to achieve a subtle evolution through time. The effect is serene, meditative and Zen-like—a pleasant antidote to the controversy.
Gone is all the reactive phlegm-spittle from MAGA trolls. Gone are the puerile “shut up and play” comments. There are no sports talk show scream-heads or argumentative gasbags anywhere. No doomscrolling is necessary. Just contemplate the imagery while a gorgeous string quartet plays the national anthem. It’s more elegant and peaceful than sitting in a Japanese garden with a cup of tea.
Ezawa is no slouch, of course. Now living and working in Oakland, he originally grew up in the German countryside and attended the prestigious Düsseldorf Academy of Art, where he encountered world famous faculty and even studied with Nam June Paik, the godfather of video art.
In a 2023 interview with Donato Loia, Ezawa said of his college era in Düsseldorf: “The student body was highly international, and video was a novel medium being taught in art schools, that’s how I started using it. In 1994, I spent a year studying abroad at the San Francisco Art Institute and fell in love with the Bay Area, especially its multiculturalism. I did everything I could to stay here.”
That he did. To date, Exawa’s work has been exhibited in and collected by major institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and even the Smithsonian.
Now the de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara can join that list.
