Independent curator, writer, and scholar Natasha Boas, coprofessor of Curation Across Disciplines, offers a foundation to this lecture series by exploring a case study in exhibition making—from context to conception to scholarship to presentation. Boas presents her current curatorial work on the Algerian woman “outsider” artist Baya Mahieddine (1931–1998), known as Baya. 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; and the Musée National de Mali, as well as many private collections in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, including the renowned Fondation Barjeel. The exhibition Baya: Woman of Algiers reexamines Baya’s career within a specifically Algerian postcolonial narrative along with the contexts of Surrealism, contemporary North African art, feminism, Mahgreb studies, and “outsider” art.

Natasha Boas, PhD, is 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.