From September 8 to 13, the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district will host the 25th edition of Parcours des Mondes, the Paris event dedicated to the arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Among the discoveries of this anniversary edition, La Potière, a Senegalese tapestry created in the 1970s by Tamsir Gueye, is one of those works that invite us to pull at the thread.
At the end of that thread lies Thiès, some 70 kilometres from Dakar, where, for nearly sixty years, artists, cartoonists and weavers have been part of a unique artistic adventure. Thousands of tapestries have emerged from this adventure. La Potière is but one of the threads in this singular story.
A New Art for a New Nation
The idea might seem paradoxical. Senegal has rich textile traditions. But low-warp wall tapestry, as practised in the great European manufactories, belongs to a different body of expertise. Yet this was precisely the technique that Senegal chose to embrace in the 1960s in order to create a new form of artistic expression.
The project was part of the cultural policy championed by Léopold Sédar Senghor. His ambition was to contribute to the emergence of a modern Senegalese art capable of engaging with techniques from elsewhere while developing its own forms and references.
To bring this ambition to life, Léopold Sédar Senghor entrusted Papa Ibra Tall, an artist and teacher, with the task of exploring this new territory. Papa Ibra Tall went to Aubusson as a pioneer, where he trained in tapestry techniques.
He then sent four young artists from the École des Arts: Mamadou Wade, Mar Fall, Doudou Diagne and Alioune Badara Diakhaté. They in turn went to train in weaving techniques at the Manufacture des Gobelins. When they returned, they were among the first Senegalese to master the craft. They immediately had to pass on what they had learned, as there was still no local expertise in this technique in Senegal.
The experiment began in Dakar. It then moved to Thiès, where it had the space needed to change scale. The Manufacture nationale de tapisserie was inaugurated there in 1966. During the first years, the teams experimented, trained and refined their skills. What had begun as a workshop gradually became a genuine laboratory.
In 1971, the experiment was considered sufficiently advanced to enter an operational phase. In less than a decade, a technique learned in France by a handful of young artists had thus become, in Thiès, a collective body of expertise.
When Artists Make Tapestry Their Own
The artists trained in France were naturally among the first to explore this form of expression, whose constraints and possibilities they understood. Tapestry imposes a very different way of working from painting: the composition must be enlarged, transferred onto a cartoon, the colours adapted to weaving, and the work is constructed on the reverse side of the loom, without the artist being able to directly follow its execution. But beyond these constraints, tapestry opens up unprecedented possibilities: it allows for monumental formats and gives a composition a presence that other media do not always offer.
Among these early experts, Papa Ibra Tall demonstrated very early on the possibilities of the new medium. With La Semeuse d’étoiles, he notably exploited the scale made possible by the large format. Mamadou Wade, returning from the Gobelins, became a weaving instructor in Thiès. At the same time, he developed a highly personal body of work centred on the figure of the bird, as in La Reine des oiseaux, where heads and wings intertwine in a dense interplay of lines and contrasts. Ansoumana Diédhiou, who joined the Manufacture in the late 1960s, initially worked as a cartoonist before developing his own body of work. With Le Roi du Fogny, he drew on the history of Casamance to create a monumental and stylised figure of the sovereign, whose attributes and symbolic power shape the composition.
The rise of tapestry accompanied a broader artistic exploration. In the 1960s and 1970s, Senegalese artists were searching for the forms of a modern art that could be rooted in the signs and imaginaries of the country while exploring new visual languages: stylisation, simplification of forms, increasingly free compositions, and, for some, abstraction. Tapestry became one of the spaces in which this exploration could continue.
The works of this period bear witness to this evolution. Scenes from local life are replayed in low-warp tapestries, within compositions in which forms are simplified and stylised. Two lovers meet beneath a baobab tree in Le Couple, by Modou Niang, where silhouettes, vegetation and geometric motifs are arranged in a highly stylised composition. In Rendez-vous au soleil, Jacob Yacouba takes this transformation of the figure even further. Rooted in the world of Saint-Louis, the scene retains the memory of an encounter, but the figures and space are fragmented into simplified forms, in a particularly expansive horizontal format. For Souleymane Keïta, tapestry accompanied an evolution already underway in his painting: in Composition, female figures dissolve into an interplay of forms and signs, coming close to abstraction. A major figure of the Dakar School, particularly known for his portraits of Senegalese women, Keïta thus transposed onto tapestry the visual explorations between figuration and abstraction that were then unfolding in his painting.
Some works became true ambassadors for Senegalese art. N’Daanaan, by Modou Niang, found its place at UNESCO. Other tapestries were presented as diplomatic gifts to heads of state: Rendez-vous au soleil, by Jacob Yacouba, Les Oiseaux de Djoudj, attributed to Amadou Sow, and La Semeuse d’étoiles, by Papa Ibra Tall, thus travelled far beyond Senegal. Over the decades, thousands of works were created in Thiès, forming an artistic heritage as vast as it is unique.
A Story That Begins to Be Told Again
After several decades of dormancy, marked by a significant slowdown in activity, the Manufactures of Thiès regained new momentum in the early 2000s. A new generation of craftspeople was trained, and new works once again began to emerge from the workshops.
One of the most spectacular signs of this revival is a work that belongs to the very first chapters of the history of Thiès. Le Grand Magal de Touba, by Papa Ibra Tall, was originally created in Aubusson to be presented to the United Nations in 1970. When the work began to show signs of wear, a new version was commissioned in 2008. This time, it was woven entirely in Thiès. Measuring 24 square metres and using 24 colours, it required 33 months of work and became the largest work ever produced in Thiès. Installed at the UN in 2012, it offers an almost literal translation of the journey travelled: what had been learned in France could now be produced in Thiès.
The revival also extends to contemporary creation. New collaborations have emerged, and artists such as Bibi Seck have entrusted new compositions to the weavers. Les Intouchables bears witness to this continuity: nearly sixty years after the first looms were installed, Thiès remains capable of translating contemporary creation into textile form.
While new works are emerging, those from the first decades are experiencing another form of revival. Several works from Thiès have entered the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, including Interrogation du masque, by Tamsir Gueye, Lity-Lity, by Bocar Diong, and La Reine des oiseaux, by Mamadou Wade, acquired in 2025. The Baltimore Museum of Art, for its part, is preparing an exhibition devoted to Senegalese tapestry and the questions of identity that run through it. From October 2026, twelve monumental tapestries, accompanied by preparatory drawings and archival material, will offer an opportunity to revisit this singular adventure.
And La Potière, presented in Paris on the occasion of Parcours des Mondes, appears in a different light, as one of the threads in a much broader story: that of a technique learned elsewhere, passed on in Senegal, and then transformed by artists who made it their own to create their own images.
