arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified: Chapter Eight
Curated by Jo-ey Tang
March 2 - May 11, 2025
Opening Sunday, March 2, 5-7pm
From March 2 - May 11, 2025, PARTICIPANT INC presents arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified: Chapter Eight, curated by Jo-ey Tang. Chapter Eight is the latest exhibition chapter of an ongoing project that explores the resonances between the individual practices of the four artists, and in relation to their work as the queer art collective fierce pussy.
Originally formed in 1991, in New York City, fierce pussy began as a shifting cadre of activists who brought lesbian identity and visibility into the streets. Four of the original core members—Nancy Brooks Brody (1962-2023), Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka—continued to work together with queer visibility and trans rights as a political cause. In their individual practices across photography, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture, each of the artists shares an attention to the mutability of materials as an inquiry into relationships between subjectivity, perception, time, and history. arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified considers their expansive and resonant art practices in activating perceptual and political agencies.
arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified was conceived by artist and curator Jo-ey Tang in collaboration with the artists in 2015. The project has unfolded over multiple chapters, taking the form of exhibitions, a book, and expanded through performances, screenings, symposia, and conversations. Beginning with an open-ended process to convene the four core members of fierce pussy’s artistic practices in conversation for the first time, each chapter contains a non-chronological selection of artworks from the late 1980s to the present. Throughout the chapters, artworks re-appear to create ever-changing juxtapositions and proximities. This process is inspired by the ceaseless lifework of AIDS activism, fierce pussy’s methodology of combining and remixing past works with new works, as well as the tactics of repetition that challenges chronology in each of the artists’ works.
For the PARTICIPANT INC exhibition, fierce pussy has conceived a new work, I got all my sisters with me (2025), as a collective call for solidarity in the current moment. The poster takes up a line from Sister Sledge’s 1979 disco anthem “We Are Family” written by Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers.
During the exhibition, the poster will be available for the taking at art organizations across New York City, as a connector of public spaces of New York, where fierce pussy first began their collective work. Collaborating venues include: Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), Giorno Poetry Systems, Housing Works, KARMA Bookstore, The Kitchen, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Light Industry, MoMA PS1, Performance Space New York, Pratt Institute’s Photography Department, Printed Matter, and Triple Canopy (list in formation).
Chapter Eight is dedicated to Nancy Brooks Brody (1962-2023).
