Arts + Design Wednesdays @ BAMPFA 

Natasha Boas, Independent curator, writer and scholar and co-professor of "Curation Across the Disciplines"

Independent curator, writer and scholar and co-professor of "Curation Across the Disciplines" will present her current curatorial work on the Algerian "outsider" woman artist Baya Mahieddine (1931–1998) known as Baya. This opening lecture offers a foundation to this year’s Big Ideas lectures on curation by exploring a case study in exhibition-making from context, to conception, to scholarship, to presentation. Baya’s works are in the collections of: the Musée de l'Art Brut, Lausanne; the Musée Picasso, Antibes; the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; the Musee national des beaux-arts d'Alger; the Musee national de Mali : as well as as many private collections in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East including the renown Fondation Barjeel. Woman of Algiers reexamines Baya’s career within a specifically Algerian post-colonial narrative along with Surrealism, contemporary North African art, Feminism, Mahgreb Studies and “outsider” art.

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Natasha Boas, PhD, is an independent international curator, critic, and scholar based in San Francisco and Paris. Trained in twentieth-century Modernist avant-garde movements, she has continued her investigations of subcultures, outsider artists, and emerging art movements with original work on such artists as Sister Corita Kent, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Clare Rojas, Chris Johanson and Alicia McCarthy. 

More info: Baya: Woman of Algiers is the first North American exhibition of works by the self-taught Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine (1931–1998). Known as Baya, she was born in Bordj el-Kiffan and orphaned at age five. Encouraged by her adoptive French mother to pursue art, she began as an adolescent to paint gouaches and make ceramics. Her work was soon discovered by fabled gallerist Adrien Maeght who, along with André Breton, organized an exhibition in Paris in 1947. Baya’s colorful depictions of women, rhythmic patterns, and bright palette drew the attention of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, with whom she later collaborated in the renowned Madoura pottery studio in Vallauris. Celebrated in both Algeria and France, Baya has yet to gain international recognition. Woman of Algiers reexamines Baya’s career within Surrealist," outsider," and North-African post-colonial art contexts. The exhibition is curated by Natasha Boas and will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue.


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Arts + Design Wednesdays is a public lecture series embedded inside our Creative Gateway undergraduate course.