RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to announce Alcatraz is an Idea, an exhibition of work across media including video, lightboxes, and an acrylic pigment print on wood. Making its East Coast debut, the centerpiece two-channel video with vinyl mural is a collaboration between Kota Ezawa and Julian Brave NoiseCat that depicts the 2019 Alcatraz Canoe Journey that commemorated 50 years since the Alcatraz Occupation. 

Ezawa used hand-drawn animation to re-interpret footage of the canoes traversing San Francisco Bay. Co-organized by NoiseCat, the event invited Indigenous peoples from across the West Coast and beyond to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island by the activist group Indians of All Tribes. The video installation was exhibited earlier this year at Ezawa’s landmark solo exhibition at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture in San Francisco, Kota Ezawa: Here and There — Now and Then.