For nearly 100 years, the literary and human rights organization PEN America has promoted the free expression of ideas, information, and beliefs through literature from around the world and has protected the authors of these works when they are threatened with violence, censorship, legal harassment, resource denial and other forms of persecution. In recent years it has extended the reach of its advocacy efforts into the field of visual arts, coming to the defense of artists who have been attacked for critiquing the dominant culture, bearing witness to inhumanity, and/or seeking to bring about change in repressive power systems.