In March 1967, nine young Algerian artists published a manifesto in which they sounded the call to ‘gather all the plastic elements invented here or there by civilizations… of the Third World.’ Later that year, the Moroccan art journal Souffles asked nine artists to fill in a survey about the state of Moroccan art and their own. Again, in their answers they repeatedly invoked the Third World alongside local Indigenous culture: ‘the revaluation of plastic tradition in the current context is not unique to us. It is a phenomenon present in all Third World countries.’ This paper offers a situated and sustained comparison of the Algerian art movement Aouchem and Moroccan painters affiliated with the Casablanca Art School. As North African artists, both groups placed popular and specifically Amazigh visual culture in dialogue with the anti-colonial Third World movement. But to what extent was this strategy born out of dialogue with each other? This paper reveals a multitude of personal, aesthetic, and discursive encounters between the two groups over the course of the 1960s. It is driven by three essential lines of inquiry: visual analysis of their artworks; oral history interviews with the artists; and written archives including newspapers, correspondence, notes, and catalogues. In the second half, the paper casts outwards from the art groups to examine the political contexts surrounding them. How did the Algerian and Moroccan governments support or suppress the artists’ work? How did transregional solidarities differ between the groups? Why is the Casablanca Art School better known internationally today than Aouchem? Drawing on recent and urgent interrogations of global art history, this transregional comparative paper seeks to understand North African modernist art production from an alternative analytical standpoint to its former coloniser-colonised relationship with France. In this sense, the paper also responds to recent research into North Africa as a site of global solidarity and community beyond both colonial and nationalist paradigms.