Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École

Regular price €101.99
A01=Jessica Gerschultz
Africa
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Jessica Gerschultz
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=WJK
COP=United States
Craft
Decorative Arts
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
Design
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Gender
Language_English
Maghrib
Middle East
Modernism
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
Tapestry
Tunisia
École de Tunis

Product details

  • ISBN 9780271083186
  • Weight: 1383g
  • Dimensions: 229 x 241mm
  • Publication Date: 31 Oct 2019
  • Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
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The arts drove a seismic cultural shift in mid-twentieth-century Tunis, as women entered ateliers and workshops previously dominated by men and as collaborations across art schools destabilized the boundary between art and craft. This volume uses the “Tunisian École”—a configuration of artists, art students, professors, and artisans from the Tunis School, the School of Fine Arts, and the National Office of Handicraft engaged in the unity of “fine” and “decorative” art—to explore the ways in which these forces reworked colonial concepts to reimagine artistic categories and integrate feminized art forms in a program of social uplift.

Focusing on the gendering of tapestry and “decorative” arts, Jessica Gerschultz investigates how art and feminism were entwined with socialist modernizing projects, from the relationship between Tunisian nationalist discourses and the figure of the woman artist to the role of art education and industry in transforming and institutionalizing hierarchies among women. In doing so, she positions women’s weaving in the context of state feminism and Tunisian socialism, arguing that a shared aesthetic and political philosophy oriented toward female creativity not only underpinned multiple forms of art and textile production but also stood as a potent metaphor for statecraft.

Important and wholly original, this study of the artist-as-craftsperson, told from the standpoint of artists in an Arab African country, recuperates a feminized, marginalized category within aesthetic modernism and furthers our understanding of the relationships among labor, gender, and artistic and creative practices in modern Tunisia.

Jessica Gerschultz is Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas.