Los Angeles Arts Immersion

Rose Salseda is an assistant professor in the Department of Art & Art History and a faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity; African & African American Studies; the Center for Latin American Studies; and American Studies at Stanford University. Specializing in the fields of African American and U.S. Latinx art, and with a research background in the art of the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean, Professor Salseda’s research explores the politics of race, identity, and representation. Her first book, Unrest: An Art History of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, foregrounds uprising as a response to the injustices of state violence. Closely reading artworks made by three generations of artists, she reveals how artists have challenged racially polarizing media portrayals and accounts of the 1992 uprising and underscored the complex intergenerational, cross-racial, and immigrant experiences of anti-Black racism and xenophobia in the United States and beyond.

In addition to her scholarly work on uprisings, Professor Salseda has interests in the intersections of visual and performance art with underground and popular music as well as the strategies of appropriation used by Black and Brown artists to critique discrimination and inequities in society. She is a founding co-director of the U.S. Latinx Art Forum, a non-profit and professional organization, where she has spearheaded and implemented data collections and research initiatives on the field of Latinx art, tracking its growth in academia, targeting areas for advocacy, and overseeing the development of resource lists on Latinx artists and institutions. She also gives talks, leads workshops, and consults art world and academic leaders on Latinx art, the state of the field, and its relationship to other areas of study.

Professor Salseda is the fourth generation of her family to have been raised in South Central Los Angeles and its surrounding neighborhoods. She is a first-generation college student whose family, art and community ties in Southern California continue to inspire and motivate her work.