She also studied art history at the Forum School in Rome for a year,[7][8] and interned at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City.

Boas attended the Vassar College from 1982-1984 where she studied art history and graduated with a BA in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986.

She received her MA in 1989 and Ph.D in 1996 in continental philosophy and theory at Yale, with a focus on the modernist avant-garde in art history and literature.

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).

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.

All moved easily between representation and abstraction, the street and the studio, and worked in various media including painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, and installation.

[24] 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.