Miss. Tic, a 66-year-old French street artist, has died

Miss. Tic, a well-known French street artist, died in Paris at the age of 66, according to her family. Her family said in a brief statement that the artist, whose real name was Radhia Novat, died on Sunday after suffering from an undisclosed illness.

Miss. Tic is regarded as a pioneer of stencil art, and her enigmatic female figures became a common sight in Paris thanks to her graffiti. In 1997, she was briefly detained on charges of vandalism to public property. Her work, however, was eventually shown in galleries in France and abroad. She’s also worked with fashion houses like Kenzo and Louis Vuitton.

From all over France, tributes have been paid to the artist.

Miss. Tic’s “iconic, resolutely feminist” work “will continue to poetize our streets for a long time,” France’s newly appointed Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak wrote on Twitter.

Christian Guemy, aka C215, a street artist, was hailed as “one of the founders of stencil art.” He wrote on Twitter that the walls of Paris’s 13th arrondissement, where her images are common, “will never be the same again.”

Miss. Tic was born in 1956 in Paris’s Montmartre neighbourhood to a Tunisian immigrant father and a Normandy mother.

Before moving to California, she studied applied arts and street theatre. In an interview with AFP in 2011, she said, “I had a background in street theatre, and I liked this idea of street art.”

“At first I thought, ‘I’m going to write poems’. And then, ‘we need images’ with these poems. I started with self-portraits and then turned towards other women,” she said.

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