In the 1910s, the French Protectorate in Morocco established two separate colonial offices dedicated to “the arts”: the Service des Beaux Arts (Service of Fine Arts, or SBA) and the Service des Arts Indigènes (Service of Native Arts, or SAI). While sharing a common investment in “art,” through their respective projects the two Services reinforced hard boundaries between “native art” and “fine art” and also what was “Moroccan” and “European.” Yet ultimately, this theoretical model often failed in practice. This paper will consider the work of the SBA and its reiterative maintenance of separate artistic spheres, as well as the inherent instability of those spheres, in the context of interwar French colonialism and Hubert Lyautey’s associationist policy. It argues, using the career of Algerian Orientalist painter Si Azouaou Mammeri as a case study, that the boundaries between these spheres often failed in practice due to the ambivalences of the colonial project as well as the active claiming of space by North African subjects. Drawing on archival evidence from Morocco and France, including Protectorate reports, correspondence, and gallery brochures, I outline the SBA’s major projects in the interwar period, including furnishing ateliers and exhibit spaces in Moroccan cities for mostly European artists. These reveal its primary orientation as a producer of colonial propaganda, as well as its de facto exclusionary policy towards North African artists, who were perceived as only capable of producing “native art,” the provenance of the SAI. Si Mammeri, as one of the few North Africans accepted into SBA programs, was a transgressive figure who troubled these boundaries. An elite Kabyle Muslim and successful practitioner of beaux arts, colonial officials proclaimed he could be the leader of a Moroccan “Renaissance” movement; SBA head Jules Borély even suggested in 1928 that Mammeri direct a school to instruct Moroccans in European art. Significantly, Mammeri was instead hired as an Inspector of Native Arts—yet he continued to play a prominent role in the broader colonial arts administration to his retirement in 1948. This paper will treat Mammeri’s career as a lens through which to better apprehend the contradictions of the colonial project, set against the backdrop of the tale of two Services. As genres were redefined and “native” subjects staked claims in new art worlds, the broader instabilities around colonial concepts of culture, race, and nation in North Africa were exposed.