Unrest - by Rose Salseda (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The first book to examine the visual art legacy of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.

On April 29, 1992, a jury's acquittal of four white Los Angeles police officers who had beaten Rodney King, a Black man, incited five days of intense protests. The 1992 Los Angeles Riots resulted in nearly four thousand fires, over $1 billion in property damage, fourteen thousand arrests, two thousand injuries, and sixty-three deaths. While many scholars have studied the period leading up to and following the riots, few have focused on how contemporary artists reacted to and continued to respond to this traumatic event.

In Unrest, Rose Salseda provides the first major art historical account of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots that chronicles the works of two generations of artists. Closely examining visual art that explores overlooked cross-racial, immigrant, and intergenerational experiences of the events, Salseda provocatively frames unrest as an act of the bereaved that makes visible the unrelenting experiences of injustice. She provides important insights into how we process violence through imagery; how the criminal justice system visualizes race and tolerates racial and xenophobic violence; and how we adapt racialized modes of viewing, normalize violence and oppression, and perhaps unwittingly contribute to these injustices. Ultimately, Unrest highlights how the experience of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots has driven artists to address the King beating and related episodes of racial violence for over thirty years--underscoring unrest as the inability to rest in the face of state-sanctioned violence, which persists to this day.

Review Quotes

"A welcome addition in the discipline of art history, Unrest will also be appreciated by scholars in other disciplines working on the ways historical events are deeply entangled in visuality. By carefully assessing artists' responses to the political, social, and confrontational events of 1992 in Los Angeles, Salseda offers a lens for better understanding subsequent forms of public activism. The topics explored in this book remain painfully timely and important."

"Lively and engaging, Unrest makes an important contribution to the study of postwar art, particularly in LA. Salseda presents stirring, deeply compelling observations on race, aesthetics, conceptual and media arts, and the ways artists engage social questions along a variety of axes."

About the Author

Rose Salseda is assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University and a cofounder of the US Latinx Art Forum.