Delighted to share the latest exhibition of fierce pussy, an artist collective that Carrie Yamaoka is a member of, “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 — 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.

The title “arms ache avid aeon” draws from Carrie Yamaoka’s artwork A is for Angel (1991), which features the four words gathered from typewriter correction ribbons collected from her day job and friends. By making visible these erasures, and by connecting to erasures upon our daily lives, culture, and society, the work stands as a fortifying paean to resistance and intimacy, through grief, desire, hope, and time.

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. For the Library of Congress entry on the song Tim Lawrence writes, “on the surface, the lyrics referred to the close relationship enjoyed by the four sisters who laid down the vocals. A little below, they expressed disco’s underlying ethos: to establish the dance floor as a social space that cut across the boundaries of class, creed, gender, nationality, race and sexuality.”

Chapter Eight is dedicated to Nancy Brooks Brody (1962-2023).

— Courtesy of PARTICIPANT INC.