Project description

National Anthem, 2018
Single-channel high-definition video with color and sound (1 minute, 48 seconds)

Kota Ezawa’s animation, National Anthem, revisits the televised protests of San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, during the 2016 season of the National Football League when players took a knee during the national anthem to protest police violence against unarmed Black men. Starting from television footage of NFL games, Ezawa meticulously created over 200 individual watercolors which became the individual frames of the animation, effectively translating the camera-based images into something handmade.  Scored with an instrumental version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the film presents Kaepernick’s gesture as an eminently American one. The trembling effect of the handmade frames slows down our reception of these mass-media images to reveal a more meditative and reverent relationship to them. Ezawa is a naturalized U.S. citizen and the son of a Japanese immigrant to Germany. He is based in Oakland, where Kaepernick played, and has said that the protests made him feel very connected to the United States. 

In solidarity with the Bozeman Rally for Black Lives on 5 June 2020, Tinworks Art showed National Anthem in the lobby of the Rialto theater along with the painting Built Upon Our Backs made collaboratively by Ella Watson, Judith Heilman, Lyla Brown, and one other young Black woman who wishes to remain anonymous. Bozeman for United Racial Justice hosted the rally in partnership with the Montana Racial Equity Project and Montana State University’s Black Student Union. Protest signs collected at the march surround Ezawa’s film.

ABOUT KOTA EZAWA 

Kota Ezawa was born in 1969 in Cologne, Germany, and currently resides between Oakland, CA and Berlin. His work has been exhibited in and collected by major institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gar- den, Washington, DC; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.