Miss.Tic

Radhia Novat, known as Miss.Tic, was born in 1956 in Montmartre and grew up in Paris before spending the early 1980s between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Back in France, she began working with stencils in 1985 and took part that same year in the first graffiti and urban art gathering in Bondy, alongside Blek le Rat and Futura 2000. A pioneering figure of Parisian stencil art, she paired her silhouettes of women with short, poetic texts, work now held in the collection of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

Between stencil and poetry

Miss.Tic paints the same recurring female silhouette across the walls of Paris, dark-haired and slender, subverting the cliché of the objectified woman rather than repeating it. The text alongside it is never a caption: it fuses with the image, somewhere between wordplay and manifesto, within an urban art practice with an openly feminist sensibility. This consistency has led her to be considered the first woman to produce a fully realised body of street art, ahead of the recognition later given to her male counterparts.