Blier's interest in African art began when she served as a Peace Corps volunteer, from 1969 to 1971 in Savé, a Yoruba center in Dahomey (now Benin Republic).

Another 2023 book by Blier, The Streets of Newtowne: A Story of Cambridge, MA (Imagine and Wonder Publications) describes the diversity of the city's from its indigenous origins to today.

For this work, Blier received a 2023 Preservation Award from the Cambridge Historical Commission which "celebrates outstanding projects and notable individuals who conserve and protect the city's architecture and history.

In addition the book was a finalist for the 2020 PROSE Award in Art History and Criticism, granted annually in recognition of the best in professional and scholarly publishing.

She also explores what African art meant to white Europeans like Picasso, whose encounters with work from afar were often bound by the walls of museums that cared little for their holdings’ original context.

Another of Blier's books, The Royal Arts of Africa (1998), a Choice Award winner, has been translated into five languages and is a leading textbook in the field; it was reissued in 2012.

In 2015 Homme Blanc/Homme Noir: Impressions d'Afrique which includes Blier's "L'Afrique et l'Occident: une introduction," received the Prix International du Livre d'Art Tribal.

[14] The interactive website included images and an ethnographic database based on GIS, along with narrative-form case studies framed around the questions concerning the social roots of creativity.

This Baobab Project led to the creation of AfricaMap in 2007, a website that seeks to bring together the best available cartographic data on the continent in an interactive GIS format.

[15] In 2011, the AfricaMap website, housed at Harvard's Center for Geographic Research, was expanded into WorldMap along with an array of other map types.

[16] In 2013, Blier and Peter Bol received a Digital Humanities Implementation Grant Award to enhance this website with their project, "Extending WorldMap to Make It Easier for Humanists and Others to Find, Use, and Publish Geospatial Information."

In 2018 she was honored with a Yoruba chieftaincy title in Nigeria, Otun Yeye Obalufon, in partial recognition of her scholarship on ancient Ife art.

In 2019 Blier received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Vermont in recognition of her scholarship in African art and her leadership in online mapping.

[18][19] She has opposed efforts to relax current zoning and permitting requirements which would allow building higher density housing up to six stories tall.

No comparable plan is enacted elsewhere, much less a deeply historical urban center like Cambridge (founded in 1630) with its rich architectural legacy.