The purpose of this eight-month qualitative investigation, conceived as a space study, was to examine literacy in two art museums. Literacy is broadly defined to include not only print text practices, but also the reading and production of images and other media. The study addresses the conditions of possibilities afforded by museums for subject formation and how participants transformed, accommodated, and resisted the conditions of possibilities. Further, data are presented showing the connections between the museum experiences and participants lives. Classrooms of African American adolescent students were followed through the experiences of two events in the two museum sites and in related school activities, such as a museum fieldtrip debriefing session, art lesson, and museum follow-up activities. Students assembled open-ended projects regarding the events. The school of which the students were a part was a faith-based Christian academy that claimed to serve the disadvantaged. The faith-based pedagogy influenced the museum experiences and the related activities. The Christian academy students, school and museum personnel, artists, and other museum visitors were formally and informally interviewed during the course of the study. Observations in the museums and school were conducted prior to and following the museum events and throughout the investigation. In addition, two groups of out-of-school adolescents experienced, were observed in, and interviewed about the same museum exhibitions. Data were analyzed in four spatial planes drawing from the writings of Deleuze, Foucault, Guattari, and Nietzsche, through: (a) data walking, (b) descriptive tracings, (c) mappings, and (d) analytic writing. Findings are presented in theatrical form where participant transactions were placed alongside analytic commentaries. The analyses, presented through dramatizations divided into two acts, focused on power and values, and show how competing forces, by the tactical uses of different sign systems, enabled certain things to be seen and said in the school and museum spaces and how other things were cast into shadow. Issues particularly salient among adolescent participants were those of school, popular culture, and identity.