Full Description
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.
Contents
List of Figures
Prologue: Beyond the Frame of the First Los Angeles Riot
Introduction
Chapter One: The Scarred Cityscape
Chapter Two: Post-Riot Looting
Chapter Three: Beyond Black and White
Chapter Four: Vision in Ruins
Epilogue: Recollecting the 1992 Los Angeles Riots Today
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
