Aleisha Barton

Aleisha E. Barton is an historian of artistic process and materiality within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has received support for her research from institutions such as the Henry Luce Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Foundation for Advancement in Conservation, and Harvard University. Across her work, Barton unites technical processes of the art studio with art historical inquiry to advance a methodology rooted in embodied knowledge and praxis. Her interests include theories of perception, explorations of artistic materials, emergent technologies, and community-based artistic practices.

Her manuscript in progress, “Your Eyes Are Limited”: Psychedelic Print in the Postwar Media Landscape, analyzes countercultural ephemera produced in San Francisco, California during the mid-to-late 1960s. This project deploys speculative histories and process-informed visual analysis in order to explore related themes of nostalgia, coalition building, and radical imagination within the Bay Area’s cultural geography.

Barton holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Minnesota. She has taught previously at Boston University and St. Cloud State University.