This scholarly biography traces the life and art of Lebanese-American neo-expressionist, Nabil Kanso (1940-2019). It explores key moments across the artist's transnational career by foregrounding his longest-running, internationally toured exhibition, the Journey of Art for Peace (1985-1993). More specifically, it traces the historical trajectory of his 10 × 28 mural-scale painting, Lebanon, from the circumstances of its production at the height of the Lebanese Civil War in 1983, through its short-lived exhibition history with the Split of Life series in the few years that followed. The book scaffolds an understanding of the artist as an activist and works toward offering distinctly spatial readings of his painterly practice, of which the act of bearing witness is highlighted as permeating the entirety of his oeuvre. It concludes with a contemporary recontextualization of Lebanon in the country's current social, political, and cultural climate, and emphasizes the artist's work as essential to the theorization of larger traditions of political and protest art.

The first of its kind and the result of a research fellowship wherein the author was invited to be the first to work through the artist's unpublished archive, this book lays the groundwork for scholarship on the art of Nabil Kanso. It draws extensively on primary source material, including personal notes, diaries, sketchbooks, correspondences, paintings, watercolors, photographs, recorded interviews, and the like.