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.

Public Programming:
On Sunday, March 9, 2025, 5pm, Triple Canopy hosts a conversation with writer Lauren O’Neill-Butler and Thomas (T.) Jean Lax (Curator, Department of Media and Performance, Museum of Modern Art, NY).
Location: Triple Canopy, 264 Canal Street, 3W, New York

On Wednesday, April 23, 2025, 6:30pm Participant Inc hosts a talk with artists Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, Carrie Yamaoka, and curator Jo-ey Tang.
Location: Participant Inc, 116 Elizabeth Street, floor one, New York

On Monday, April 28, 2025, 7pm, The Museum of Modern Art’s Modern Mondays series presents a screening of Joy Episalla’s film As long as there's you, As long as there's me (2023). Special guest Mx Justin Vivian Bond, who appears in the film, will open the evening with a short musical performance. Following the screening, Episalla will be joined in conversation with Jo-ey Tang and Stuart Comer, MoMA’s Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance.
Location: The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York
Visit MoMA.org for more information and tickets

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 — have continued to work together around issues of queer visibility and trans rights. 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.

This project was conceived by artist and curator Jo-ey Tang in collaboration with the artists in 2015, and 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 fierce pussy’s methodology of combining and remixing past works with new works, as well as the tactics of repetition that challenge 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: American Academy of Arts & Letters, 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).