Vendeur d'ombrelles et d'eventails, Yahia Turki

“The experience of everyday life constitutes a constant contribution to the artist’s experience.”
—Safia Farhat, La Presse, January 16, 1970
Artists across Africa and the African Diaspora sought to reconcile modernist binaries such as art/craft, high/low, and modern/traditional in various media. Two-dimensional graphic arts such as postcards, illustrations for literary journals, and postage stamps enabled artists to widely circulate such imagery. The artist group École de Tunis (Tunis School) formed in 1948 to forge a Tunisian artistic modernism collective. Its members included Jellal Ben Abdallah, whose early drawings illustrated the feminist publication Leïla in the 1930s; Ali Bellagha, who opened a gallery to elevate Tunisian arts; and Safia Farhat, the first Tunisian director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis and professor of tapestry and decorative arts. The stamps and postcard on display reveal the group’s engagement with artistic heritage such as embroidered wedding costumes, spinning wool, pottery, woven fans and hats, and musical instruments. The Topeka-born artist Aaron Douglas also shaped pan-African philosophies of uplifting African and African-American art and society. Like artists of the École de Tunis, Douglas evoked African design elements to create murals and graphics. His 1926 cover illustration for the magazine Opportunity accompanied poems