The Yale Mediterranean Series with Alice Kaplan

Alice Kaplan will be in conversation with Amara Lakhous about her upcoming book: Seeing Baya: Portrait of an Algerian Artist in Paris, Chicago University Press, 2024 (October).
 

NB: The event time and place will be confirmed when possible.

The first biography of the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, celebrated in mid-twentieth-century Paris, her life shrouded in myth.  

On a flower farm in colonial Algeria, a servant and field worker known as Baya escaped the drudgery of her labor by coloring the skirts in fashion magazines. Three years later, in November 1947, her paintings and fanciful clay beasts were featured in a solo show in Paris. She wasn’t yet sixteen years old. In this first biography of Baya, Alice Kaplan tells the story of a young woman seemingly trapped in subsistence who becomes a sensation in the French capital, then mysteriously fades from the history of modern art—only to reemerge after independence as an icon of Algerian artistic heritage.
 
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