The Department of History of Art & Architecture invites you to the 2025-2026 HAA Guest Lecture Series

Sponsored by the Boston University Center for the Humanities, the HAA Guest Lecture Series brings together historians of art and architecture specializing in diverse fields and genres. Prominent scholars and museum professionals are invited to share their latest work with the BU community in a lecture followed by a Q&A.

The 2025/2026 HAA Guest Lecture Series is organized by graduate students: Rachel Kline & Isaline Lefrançois

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Upcoming Lecture

Tuesday, March 3rd at 6 PM in CAS 132
Dr. Aleisha Barton
Ray and Margaret Horowitz Visiting Professor in American Art, Boston University
Title:“America Needs Indians: A Sensorial Union of Architecture, Technology, and Photography.”

Abstract: In 1964, Stewart Brand partnered with Zach Stewart, a Bay Area-based architect, to form a nonprofit organization titled “America Needs Indians.” Inspired by Brand’s photographic practice in preceding years, during which he visited reservations across the United States to capture images of “contemporary Indian life,” the organization sought to create immersive experiences that would draw public attention to the value of Indigenous perspectives in the rapidly changing technological landscape of the mid-twentieth century. To accomplish this task, Brand and Stewart developed the format of the sensorium, which merged colorful lighting, bespoke staging, and projections of photographs to cultivate an experiential multimedia presentation focused on Indigenous identity and artistic tradition. While these sensoriums traveled around the country to various museums and colleges, the most memorable iteration occurred at the Trips Festival in January 1966, a watershed moment for San Francisco’s psychedelic revolution. This lecture will position Brand and Stewart’s sensorium in conversation with psychedelic posters produced soon after for San Francisco venues, which frequently utilized Native American portraiture for their subject matter. In doing so, this lecture will contend with psychedelia’s relationship to indigeneity, cultural memory, and media experimentation. 

Archive of Past Lectures