Dr. Rose Salseda is an assistant professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University and a founding co-director of the US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF). Specializing in both the fields of African American and US Latinx art, and with a research background in the art of the African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean, Dr. Salseda’s research explores the politics of race, identity, and representation; the intersections of art with underground and popular music; and the aesthetic strategies of appropriation, abstraction, and minimalism.
Dr. Salseda’s first book, Unrest: The 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the Artist’s Drive for Justice (under contract with the University of Chicago Press), foregrounds uprising as a response to the injustices of state violence. Closely reading artworks made by two generations of artists, she reveals how they have challenged racially polarizing media portrayals and underscored the complex intergenerational, cross-racial, and immigrant experiences of anti-Black racism and xenophobia in the United States and abroad.
As a first-generation college student and the fourth generation of her family to have been raised in South Los Angeles, Dr. Salseda’s research and scholarship are inspired and influenced by her family and community ties in Southern California.