This research explores how modern Maghribi artists, particularly women like Baya, used portraiture to navigate the politics of identity, gender, and decolonization in the mid-20th century. Centering on Baya’s overlooked ceramic sculptures produced in postwar France, the project critiques art history’s privileging of painting and its failure to engage with artists working in so called “minor” media like ceramics. Through feminist and postcolonial frameworks this research examines how Maghribi artists navigated European modernism, anticolonial resistance, and indigenous identity– challenging Eurocentric narratives of modernism while highlighting the role of North African artists in shaping alternative modernities.