In 1962, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture sponsored the travel of a group of artists and writers from Cairo to Aswan, where the construction of the monumental Aswan High Dam was underway. Lead by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (1900–1989), this group embarked on a boat tour of the Nubian villages that would soon be forcibly displaced by the redirected flood path of the Nile. Egyptian Minister of Culture Tharwat Okasha framed this project as a means of recording the culture and heritage of these communities before they disappeared. This artists’ tour overlapped with and paralleled the goals of the American University in Cairo’s Nubian Ethnological Survey, which endeavored to record and preserve knowledge about these Nubian communities in advance of their relocation through a combination of “salvage” and “developmental” anthropology. (1) In this paper, I offer close visual analysis of the artworks produced from this trip, including works by Taheya Halim (1919–2003), Gazbia Sirry (1925–2021), and Hussein Bicar (1913–2002). I ask how the role of the artist might have intersected with that of the ethnographer in Nubia and evaluate how artists reproduced the logics of “salvage anthropology” through their artworks. This paper draws on archival and museum collection research conducted in Cairo, Alexandria, and Aswan and uses methods drawn from social art history, which reads visual objects through the lens of their social, economic, and political contexts. I pair visual analysis of these artworks with analysis of their circulation as illustrations in popular Egyptian magazines and state-sponsored publications as well as exhibitions staged in Cairo to understand how these artworks mediated information about Nubians and their impending displacement to a broader Egyptian public. I argue that the depictions produced by artists who traveled to Nubia contributed to the construction of Nubia as a “bounded culture” at a remove from the larger flow of Egyptian society and helped to shape perceptions of Nubians as a sympathetic but abstracted and flattened “other” to be acted upon rather than agentive and dimensional Egyptian citizens who might contest their displacement or make alternative demands of the state. In doing so, this paper brings forward how the Egyptian state harnessed visual culture to support the logics of postcolonial developmentalism in the 1950s and 60s. 1) Hopkins, Nicholas S. and Sohair R. Mehanna, eds., Nubian Encounters: The Story of the Nubian Ethnological Survey 1961 – 1964, (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010): 4.