The Art of Defiance is an ethnographic portrait of how graffiti writers see their city and, in turn, how their city sees them. It explores how becoming a graffiti writer helps disenfranchised urban citizens negotiate their cultural identities, build their social capital, and gain a voice within an urban environment that would prefer they remain quiet, passive, and anonymous. In order to both demystify and complicate our understanding of the practice of graffiti writing, this book pushes past the narrative that links the origins of graffiti to criminal gangs and instead offers a detailed portrait of graffiti as a rich urban culture with its own rules and practices. To do so, it examines the cultural history of graffiti in Philadelphia from the early 1970s onward and explores what it is like to be a graffiti writer in the city today. Ultimately, Tyson Mitman aims to humanize graffiti writers and to show that what they do is not merely destructive or puerile, but, rather, adds something important to the urban experience that is a conscious and deliberate act on the part of its practitioners.

Hannah Ryggen (1894-1970) was a Swedish-Norwegian modern artist who began her career as a painter before switching to creating political art in the form of monumental tapestries. Combining the decorative and the political, Ryggen was ahead of her time with her turn to "political weaving." She was also a feminist with strong communist sympathies involved in the international workers' movement. Her dramatic, beautiful tapestries were shown at both the Paris and Brussels World's Fairs, but she was largely forgotten by the international art world in the decades after her death. In recent years, however, as interest in both fiber arts and pioneering women artists has grown, Ryggen's work has returned to the public eye, with major international exhibitions and fresh attention from curators, collectors, and critics. A widely recognized authority on Ryggen, Marit Paasche brings this important Scandinavian artist to the foreground in this biography, the first published on Ryggen in English. Paasche looks at Ryggen within the social, political, and cultural contexts of her time and explores how these issues informed her work, from her anti-fascist tapestry that depicted a spear piercing Mussolini's head to one protesting the war in Vietnam. Published to correspond with a major retrospective in Frankfurt, of which Paasche is one of the curators, Hannah Ryggen is a foundational book that will provide a crucial introduction of this artist to a broader audience.

How are issues related to identity representation negotiated in Middle Eastern and North African museums? Can museums provide a suitable canvas for minorities to express their voice? Can narratives change and stereotypes be broken and, if so, what kind of identities are being deployed? Against the backdrop of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaken the region in recent years, the contributors to this volume interrogate a range of case studies from across the region - examining how museums engage inclusion, diversity and the politics of minority identities. They bring to the fore the region's diversity and sketches a 'museology of disaster' in which minoritised political subjects regain visibility.

A visually stunning examination of El Greco’s work that considers the artist’s constant reinvention and professional drive Renowned for a singular artistic vision, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco (1541–1614), developed his distinctive painting style as he assiduously pursued professional success. This fresh and engaging survey of El Greco’s work explores varied aspects of the artist’s career—his aesthetic education in Italy, the mixed reception of his mature works in Spain, his uncompromising approach to business, and the baroque logistics of his Toledo workshop—and reveals the depth of El Greco’s astounding ambition. The impressive volume focuses in particular on his 1577–79 altarpiece paintings for the Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo—among them the magnificent Assumption of the Virgin—which heralded the artist’s arrival in Spain after productive periods of formation and re-formation in Crete, Venice, and Rome. Lavishly illustrated and clothbound with gilded edges, this publication features reproductions and scholarly discussions of more than 60 works ranging from large-scale canvases to intimate panels, with essays that elucidate the motives and meanings behind the artist’s constantly changing and inventive approach.

A major publication on the radical and political work of one of Britain's most celebrated living figurative artists. Born in Lisbon in 1935, Dame Paula Rego DBE left Portugal as a teenager to study in London, which has been her principal home for more than sixty years. She is celebrated for bold and intense paintings, drawings and prints that intertwine the private and the public, the intimate and the political, combining autobiographical elements with stories from literature, folklore and mythology, references to earlier art, and observations on the contemporary world. She uses arresting imagery and dark symbolism to create unsettling narrative tableaux that challenge the established order and unpick social and sexual codes embodied by family, religion and the state. Charged with a unique psychic and emotional drama and magic realism, her works express what it is to be human - and a woman in particular - and living under the oppressive hierarchies and controlling mores of patriarchal society. This book accompanies a major touring exhibition spanning Rego's entire career since the 1960s, with a focus on work that addresses the moral challenges to humanity, particularly in the face of violence, poverty, political tyranny, gender discrimination, and grief. The selected pictures, which include previously unseen paintings and works on paper from the artist's family and close friends, reflect Rego's perspective as an empathetic, courageous woman and a defender of justice. The book includes a substantial text by exhibition curator Catherine Lampert that will consider Rego's oeuvre as a whole and draw upon the artist's own interpretations and revelations about individual works, as well as appreciations of the artist's achievements by the acclaimed young American writer Kate Zambreno and new Irish author Sally Rooney

Florida Historical Society Harry T. & Harriette V. Moore Award Drawing on previously unpublished sources and newly unsealed records, Judith Poucher profiles five individuals who stood up to the Johns Committee. Virgil Hawkins and Ruth Perry were civil rights activists who, respectively, foiled the committee’s plans to stop integration at the University of Florida and refused to divulge Florida and Miami NAACP records. G. G. Mock, a bartender in Tampa, was arrested and shackled in the nude by police but would not reveal the name of her girlfriend, a teacher. University of Florida professor Sig Diettrich was threatened with twenty years in prison and being "outed," yet he still would not name names. Margaret Fisher, a college administrator, helped to bring the committee's investigation of the University of South Florida into the open, publicly condemning their bullying. By reexamining the daring stands taken by these ordinary citizens, Poucher illustrates not only the abuses propagated by the committee but also the collective power of individuals to effect change.

This book attempts to uncover scripts through which notions of deviance as well as acts of defiance unravel. It considers an archive made up of significant scripts or narratives of defiance that endure through subaltern people's cultural formations despite and in response to dominant ideas and ideologies.