In the 1960s and 70s, Tunisian cultural policies implicated both female citizens and modern artists in the service of the nation, resulting in the state patronage of an elite woman artist, Safia Farhat. The government simultaneously supported a revival of the artisanat, and particularly women's weaving, as emblematic of national heritage. This paper analyzes the iconography of a series of modern tapestries designed by Safia Farhat and executed by women artisans employed by the Office National de l'Artisanat. The wife of a government minister, Safia Farhat was the first female director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Tunis (from 1966-1979) and the only female member of the prestigious group of artists known as the Ecole de Tunis. Her elite position enabled her to carry out large-scale artistic projects, such as the production of monumental tapestries for display in newly constructed buildings. In her series titled "Ulysse et Pen lope," Farhat combined local materials, the geometric abstraction of women's weaving, and nationalist imagery to evoke Tunisian cultural patrimony and the birth of a modern national identity. As a cultural producer, Farhat contributed to debates regarding women's transforming social roles in President Habib Bourguiba's quest for modernization. An iconographic analysis of Farhat's tapestries provides a view into how elite women envisioned gender reform in post-Independence Tunisia. This paper assesses the relation between the geometric and figurative motifs depicted in Farhat's representations of Penelope and drawings made by French ethnographers who established the Office National de l'Artisanat. These drawings, which initially appeared in catalogues of women's textile production in the 1950s, were re-appropriated by Tunisian nationalists to symbolize national patrimony in the 1960s. Significantly, during this period, government programs directed at revitalizing the artisanat, and specifically the work of women artisans living in the Gafsa region, intersected squarely with grander modernizing reforms aimed at women's emancipation and economic development. Farhat refers to these reforms in her tapestry "Prnslope I," in which the mythical character Penelope is seated weaving (or unweavinge) a textile formally resembling those traditionally produced by women weavers of the Gafsa region. While this image may signify the fortitude of Tunisian cultural patrimony, upon which nationalist discourses were based, the ambiguity expressed in this work of art also embeds the complexity and contradictions faced by Tunisian women in the formation of a modern identity.