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 Ezawa and 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.

In 1969, as a protest against the government’s mistreatment of Native Americans, Indians of All Tribes reclaimed Alcatraz Island through the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 that stipulated unused federal land be returned to tribes. The activists offered $24 in glass beads and red cloth to buy the island, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the purported 1626 purchase of another island, Manhattan, by the Dutch. Their proclamation, read aloud by Mohawk ironworker and activist Richard Oakes, states: “We, the Native Americans, re-claim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery. We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and hereby offer the following treaty.”

Alcatraz is an idea engages with layered histories as the artists pair the 1969 occupation with its 2019 commemoration. The audio brings together old and new as well: Oakes’ voice is heard, accompanied by a contemporary composition by Mali Obamsawin. But the work pulls threads of history, culture, and mythology from Indigenous territories across the United States and beyond, reaching back to the colonization of this hemisphere by Europeans, probing enduring struggles over land stolen from First Peoples, and challenging the dominant narrative of the most potent symbol of the American carceral state.

As Oakes said, “Alcatraz is not an island. It’s an idea.” As a former federal prison, Alcatraz has been mythologized in American culture as an inescapable penitentiary. The concept has returned under President Donald Trump, who has suggested Alcatraz should be reopened as a prison, and who has named a hastily constructed immigrant detention facility in Florida “Alligator Alcatraz.” Alcatraz is an idea suggests there are other histories—ones that point towards liberatory, decolonial, and Indigenous alternatives—that live on, obscured by powerful carceral and colonial forces and mythologies that continue to shape Alcatraz just as they continue to shape America.

Soon after moving to the United States in the 1990s, Ezawa began making work that reflects on American culture, and the ways in which historical events echo across time. His work often examines events depicted on film or in photography and re-creates them in flat planes of color using watercolors and digital drawing in an attempt to give them new relevance. “It’s a meditation on an image,” Ezawa explains of his practice. “I start out with a piece of archival or found footage and then I kind of take it apart into all its individual aspects - and then I recreate all these individual aspects in my drawing style and then put it back together. It’s a little bit like taking a car apart and then recreating it out of clay or some other material and putting it back together.”

NoiseCat is a writer, filmmaker, and activist who helped organize the 2019 Alcatraz Canoe Journey. His first documentary, Sugarcane (2024) premiered at Sundance and was nominated for a Peabody and an Academy Award. In a 2019 New York times op-ed, NoiseCat wrote of the 2019 event: “For a day — or maybe even just a morning — the canoes made it possible to see Alcatraz as what it is for Native people: a symbol of our rights, resistance and persistence; an island reclaimed by our elders half a century ago; an idea, a story and a moment of organized action that bent the arc of justice in favor of the Indigenous.”

Also on view will be three new lightboxes depicting images related to Alcatraz is an idea, two new lightboxes revisiting Ezawa’s seminal History of photography series, and one acrylic pigment print on wood.