"Art of Engagement takes the first comprehensive look at the key role of California's art and artists in politics and culture since 1945. Tracing the remarkably fertile confluence of political agitation and passionately engaged art, Peter Selz leads readers on a journey that begins with the Nazi death camps and moves through the San Francisco Bay Area's free speech movement of 1964, the birth of Beat and hippie countercultures, the Chicano labor movement in the San Joaquin Valley, the beginning of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, the women's movement, and some of the most radical manifestations of gay liberation, Red Power, and environmental activism. He also deals with artists' responses to critical issues such as censorship and capital punishment. Selz follows California's outpouring of political art into the present with responses to September 11 and the war in Iraq. In the process, Selz considers the work of artists such as Robert Arneson, Sandow Birk, Hans Burkhardt, Enrique Chagoya, Judy Chicago, Bruce Conner, Mark di Suvero, Llyn Foulkes, Rupert Garcia, Helen and Newton Harrison, Wally Hedrick, Suzanne Lacy, George Longfish, Hung Liu, James Luna, Martha Roster, Peter Saul, Miriam Schapiro, Allan Sekula, Masami Teraoka, and Carrie Mae Weems. Abundantly illustrated, Art of Engagement showcases many types of media, including photographs, found objects, drawings and prints, murals, painting, sculpture, ceramics, installations, performance art, and collage. Readers will come away from the book with a historical sense of the significant role California has played in generating political art and also how the state has stimulated politically engaged art throughout the world."--BOOK JACKET.