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In this essay Andy Young features the artist Bahia Shehab, whose work has been a vital part of the thriving art of graffiti in revolutionary Egypt. Bahia Shehab’s “One Thousand Times No Project” began as a study of representations of the word “no” in Arabic script over the past fourteen hundred years and evolved into spray-painting those negations in stenciled graffiti on the walls of Cairo’s city streets as a form of protest. Revolutionary graffiti by Shehab serve to bridge Egypt’s long and storied history with its contemporary events, break down barriers between class, literacy levels, and gender by depicting work accessible to all, and show the women’s fight for justice as part of the larger struggle.

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