`Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art` travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara
(Artdaily.org)

Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara is presenting ​Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art, a series of light-boxes and video animations by Oakland, CA-based artist Kota Ezawa that chronicles some of the most infamous and high-profile museum heists in history. At the heart of this exhibition is a series of images paying homage to the 13 artworks—including those by Degas, Manet, Rembrandt, and Vermeer— stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Ezawa’s digital interpretations of the stolen Stewart Gardner masterpieces are presented to scale and illuminated in light-boxes that serve as modern apparitions of the centuries-old works. These technological vestiges are at once copies of the originals, while also carrying the mark of Ezawa’s animated hand. Reduced to flat planes of color, the original paintings