Baya Mahieddine was a self-taught Algerian modern artist whose vivid paintings and ceramics of women, birds and luxuriant vegetation reshaped understandings of North African art in the mid-twentieth century. Born Fatma Haddad in Bordj El Kiffan in 1931, she was orphaned at five and later taken in by Marguerite Caminat, a French painter and collector in Algiers who encouraged her early experiments in gouache and clay. As a teenager, Baya developed a distinctive visual language, combining...