Natasha Boas

Natasha Boas
Ph.D.
Born Pamela Natasha Leof
(1964-11-20) November 20, 1964
New Haven, Conn.
Residence San Francisco, California and Paris, France
Citizenship American and French
Alma mater University of California, Berkeley
Yale University
Occupation Curator, writer, educator
Organization New Langton Arts
Headlands Center for the Arts
Women in the Arts
Art Table of America
Board member of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Awards Mellon Fellowship for the Humanities
Luce Award
Getty Leadership Award

Natasha Boas is a French American contemporary art curator, writer, and educator. An adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts, she is a specialist in the art of the San Francisco Mission School, and has been involved in exhibitions at museums and galleries including the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Galerie Maeght, the American Center, and the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art.[1][2][3][4]

Early life and education

Boas was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised in San Francisco and Paris. As a teenager in San Francisco, Boas spent time with the robot art collective Survival Research Laboratories, and in her junior year in high school worked as an art restoration intern at the de Young Museum. She also studied art history at the Forum School in Rome for a year, [5][6] and interned at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City.

She then enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and later interned at the Stephen Leiber Gallery. She graduated with a BA in comparative literature, and received a master's degree Boas was awarded a master's degree in French litertature and her Ph.D. in continental philosophy at Yale, with a focus on the modernist avant-garde in art history and literature. Her dissertation, "Sublime Configurations: Breton, Bataille and the Surreal" was published in 1996 under the direction of Denis Hollier, an editor at October.[7][8] While at Yale, she curated her first exhibits at an underground space for artists and performances called Basement 27.

Career

Boas began her career in 1990 as the gallery director at the Galerie Montenay in Paris. From 1992 through 1996, she served as the visual arts curator for The American Center, working in New York and Paris. While there, she coordinated exhibitions including Off the Shelf/Off the Wall: The Artist's Book After 1960 (1996); Micromégas with Jon Kessler (1995); Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, War and Memory (1995); Stations by Bill Viola (1995) and Nam June Paik, David and Marat (1994). After leaving the American Center, she worked as a curatorial associate at the Centre Georges Pompidou, and as the curator for the Busan International Arts Festival in Busan, Korea. In 1996, Boas returned to San Francisco, and was appointed public programs curator at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where she built new public programs, including panels, symposia, Internet sites, artist conversations and museum studies classes for adult audiences. Between 2001 and 2010, she curated exhibits at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and New Langton Arts. Boas additionally served as the curator and acting director of the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art (2007-2012) and executive director and chief curator of the Sonoma County Museum (2001-2004), where she curated the exhibit of James Turrell: Light and Land.[8][9] In November 2014, she was selected to curate and organize the inaugural exhibit for Galerie Maeght's San Francisco opening.[5][10]

From 2004 through 2008, Boas was a member of the founding faculty of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts. In addition to developing thesis exhibition classes and program content, commissions and catalogs, she served as a thesis advisor. During 2005-2009, she wrote on art and trend-spotting for the home for Condé Nast's style magazine Domino. She was an early writer for Dwell and has been a contributor to The Believer since 2010.[11][12][13]

The Mission School and Energy That Is All Around

Boas' interest in the Mission School was amplified while she was at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the museum exhibited several of the artists associated with the movement in the 1997 show Bay Area Now: A Regional Survey of Contemporary Art. A response in part to the gentrification of the Mission District at the start of the Bay Area dot-com boom, the artists embraced street aesthetics and lowbrow visual culture. They "made and promoted graffiti; all had tagging names. All moved easily between representation and abstraction, the street and the studio, and worked in various media including painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, and installation. Although each developed a distinct artistic style and philosophy, they all were drawn to the radical and the political. Not surprisingly, all took inspiration from Bay Area Figuration, the Beats, Funk art, and Punk."[14][15] Boas immersed herself in the work of the artists who would come to be known as members of the Mission School in 2002. She contributed the essay "A Partial and Incomplete Oral History of the Mission School" to the catalog for the Barry McGee exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum;[13][16] her essay was also included in the book associated with the show. In 2010, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art stated that the Mission School was "the most significant art movement to emerge out of San Francisco in the late twentieth century".[17]

In 2013, Boas organized and curated Energy is All Around for the San Francisco Art Institute; it was the first survey exhibition to examine the Mission School as a historical reality. Work by Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, Alicia McCarthy and Ruby Neri was included in the exhibit, which consisted of 130 paintings, drawings and sculptures dating from 1990 to 2013. In a review of the show, The New York Times wrote: "(It) bristles infectiously with youthful urgency"; The Huffington Post stated: "If one ever wanted to witness how an entire movement can be inspired and evolve, this show is not to be missed." The show opened at the San Francisco Art Institute in late 2013. In April 2014, Energy Is All Around was exhibited at the Grey Gallery at New York University.[1][17][18]

Awards and distinctions

Selected publications

References

  1. 1 2 Johnson, Ken (April 24, 2014). "Prickly but Puppyish in San Francisco". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  2. ↑ Baker, Kenneth (September 27, 2013). "Mission School 'Energy' survey at SF Art Institute". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  3. ↑ Connell, Regina (July 29, 2011). "The Craft of Curation: Natasha Boas". Handful of Salt. Retrieved 11 December 2014.
  4. ↑ Harris, Pamela (September 6, 2001). "The New Boss". Metroactive. Retrieved 12 December 2014.
  5. 1 2 Kino, Carol (October 23, 2014). "A Gallery's Opening Movement Jules Maeght Unveils 'Art in Motion'". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  6. ↑ Chun, Kimberly (November 12, 2014). "'Art in Motion': Maeght grandson opens new S.F. gallery". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 12 December 2014.
  7. ↑ Pamela Natasha Leof (1996). Sublime Configurations: Breton, Bataille and the Surreal. Yale University Press. Retrieved 11 December 2014.
  8. 1 2 Giles, Gillian (September 12, 2002). "The Sonoma County Museum dares to dream". North Bay Bohemian. Retrieved 12 December 2014.
  9. ↑ "James Turrell: Light and Land". Sonoma County Museum. Retrieved 15 December 2014.
  10. ↑ Garchick, Leah (April 9, 2008). "We Are What We Listen To". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 15 December 2014.
  11. ↑ "People: Natasha Boas". Dwell Magazine. Retrieved 12 December 2014.
  12. ↑ "Gary Hill's Mediated Media". San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 12 December 2014.
  13. 1 2 "Contributors: Natasha Boas". The Believer. Retrieved 12 December 2014.
  14. ↑ O'Shea, Jamie (April 24, 2014). "'Energy That Is All Around: Mission School' at NYU". Super Touch Art. Retrieved 12 December 2014.
  15. ↑ Pritkin, Renny (September 29, 2013). "Mission School @ San Francisco Art Institute". Square Cylinder. Retrieved 12 December 2014.
  16. ↑ Grant, Danielle. "The Mission School Gets Cross Examined". Art Slant. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
  17. 1 2 "Energy That Is All Around" (PDF) (Press release). New York University.
  18. ↑ Beltran, J. D. (December 16, 2013). "Last Days for Two of the Best Fall Bay Area Shows: City of Disappearances and Energy That Is All Around". The Huffington Post. Retrieved 12 December 2014.
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