Conversation with Jessica Gerschultz (2023)

Conversation with Jessica Gerschultz

Moderated by Beya Othmani

Friday 13rd at 4pm, 32bis

32bis, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University, and the Centre d’études maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT) are delighted to invite you to a conversation with Jessica Gerschultz about her book Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École: Fabrications of Modernism, Gender, and Power, published in 2019 with Pennsylvania State University Press.

The talk will be moderated by curator and art historian Beya Othmani.

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.

Jessica Gerschultz is an Associate Professor and Graduate Studies Director in the Department of African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas and a 2018 Hans-Robert Roemer Fellow at the Orient-Institut Beirut. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, gender and materiality, and feminist art history and methodologies. She currently works on transregional articulations of modernism with an emphasis on tapestry and fiber art.