Following Egypt's independence in 1919 and up to the early Mubarak period in the 1980s, a new post-colonial state emerged that increasingly looked to science, the law, culture, and the built environment to regulate and modernize its subjects. During this time, coastal developments for leisure were identified as a testing ground for modern design and social progress. "Testing Waters and Oils: Constructions of Modernity and Post-Coloniality in Depictions of Egyptian Mediterranean Beaches, 1930-1970" reveals how artists of the time produced paintings of modern Egyptian beaches that became their political tool for imagining decolonized and/or feminist political realities. Through interviews, formal analyses, and archival research, I ask: were artists actually in tension with state claims of progress through their depictions of marginalized Bedouin communities and class-based stratification on Egypt's Mediterranean coast, or were they primarily spreading state-sanctioned ideas of modernity? In other words, are these artistic narratives serving the state's mandate or subverting it with challenges to women's societal role, for example? So far, collected data has suggested that female-depicted nudity was, in fact, serving both art critics and the state's preoccupation with social progress and the unveiling of women -- while at the same time, artists also questioned the ravages of modernity through depictions of the coast as a fragile eco-system, open to exploitation and over-development. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin formulates his critique of the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics as the quintessential fascist enterprises; this critique continues to weigh heavily on attempts to connect art and politics. In this paper, I will consider the broader topic of whether art hampers political action or if it can be integral to the formulation of revolutionary perspectives.