This paper will examine representations of gendered labor in the decorative programs of Safia Farhat and other École de Tunis artists in relation to socioeconomic transformations in postcolonial Tunisia. Between 1950 and 1978 Farhat and her elite colleagues designed dozens of monumental artworks for municipal buildings under the so-called 1% law. Initiated under the French Protectorate by Lucien Paye in 1950 and reinstated by Habib Bourguiba’s government, this law allocated 1% of a civic building’s construction budget towards its decoration with “modern” artwork. In the post-Independence period, Safia Farhat, Abdelaziz Gorgi, Jellal Ben Abdallah, and Zoubeïr Turki received and directed the majority of these commissions, which included the fabrication of tapestries, ceramic tile panels, stone obelisks, and low-relief friezes. While the thematic content of this corpus varies, numerous representations of female and male workers merit inquiry given the contested nature of labor conditions during the early postcolonial period, particularly during the years of “socialist” reform (1962-1970.) My paper will take as its starting point Safia Farhat’s mural of two male laborers in the main entrance to the offices of the Société Tunisienne de Sucre in Béja. As the sole woman in the École de Tunis and the first Tunisian director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis, Farhat occupies a tenuous position in the art historiography, in part due to her marriage to a Bourguibist minister and her entrepreneurial efforts in harnessing state commissions for “decorative” works. My paper will contextualize Farhat’s imagery in relation to figures portrayed by her male colleagues. Specifically, I will interrogate two interrelated facets of these artworks: how the iconography of artwork depicting laborers may be construed as gendered, as well as the significant position of the artwork within such locations as sugar refineries, textile factories, tourist hotels, and the headquarters of the Bourse du travail in Tunis. What might gendered representations of labor signify when installed in state-run sites of service and production, and to which audiences? While local art historiography frequently reduces the content of École de Tunis artworks to modernist/derivative representations of “folklore,” I will argue for a multivalent assessment that probes the broader, gendered polemics of modernization. This paper will be based on extensive photographic and archival documentation conducted in Tunisia between 2009-2010 and 2013-2014.