1991 List Posters  

fierce pussy’s first project was to reclaim derogatory language and transform it into an affirmation of our collective identity. 

1991 Family Pictures and Found Photos

Much as we reclaimed language in the list posters, in this next project we used our own baby pictures to represent our personal experiences of growing up. Using these snapshots allowed us to challenge heteronormative assumptions about identity, family, gender and appearance.

1992 Re-naming the Streets

Using sidewalk stencils and spray paint, as well as spray-painted cardboard street signs, we re-named many streets along the route of the Gay Pride Parade. We went out late at night/early morning with ladders and wire, installing our own signs on top of the official ones.  A few examples: Christopher Street became Tomboy Turnpike, Hudson Street became Audre Lorde Lane, Sheridan Square became fierce pussy Plaza, Bleecker Street became Martina Navratilova Court, Fifth Avenue became Joan Nestle Boulevard, and 10th street became Kitty Tsui Avenue

1993 Billboard Project, Graz, Austria

In conjunction with “Plakate”, an ongoing series of artists’ billboards sponsored by the Graz Kunstverein. We had numerous billboards throughout the city of Graz, with a blow-up of a black-and-white 5th grade class photo from 1972 with large typewriter text which read: “How many lesbians in this picture?”

1993 Boycott Colorado

A series of worksin support of the Boycott Colorado campaign which was waged in the wake of anti-gay legislation passed by voters in Colorado.

1994 Bathroom Project at Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center

A site-specific installation in the women’s bathroom made as part of the exhibition “Outhouses” at the New York Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, incorporating a billboard-sized poster, messages etched on mirrors inside the stalls and an edition of custom-printed toilet paper.

1994 Next time We’ll Bury It

 This poster features a redacted newspaper article. We also did a version with the article intact. One evening in 1993, John Bobbitt came home drunk and raped his wife Lorena in their Virginia apartment. Lorena got up afterwards, went to the kitchen, got a knife and cut off John’s penis while he was sleeping. She then took off in the car and flung the severed penis into a field. The police searched, found the penis and re-attached it. This was our response.

1994 No Special Rights 

In the early ‘90s , the right wing and the Christian Coalition embarked on a campaign using the phrase“no special rights for homosexuals”  A slew of legislation across the country made it legal to discriminate against queers in the workplace, housing, parenting and healthcare. Their incendiary homophobic language created a climate which encouraged violence against queers, and across the country there were countless bashings, murders and fire-bombings. Fierce pussy responded with a poster campaign appropriating “no special rights” to ask heterosexuals the question: how would it feel to have that hatred directed at you

1994 fierce pussy Mobile

Our own low-budget moving billboard cruised through the streets of New York during Stonewall weekend, featuring three 6 foot by 12 foot posters (enlarged using color xerox) wheatpasted to the sides and back of the truck.

2008 …AND SO ARE YOU

Four of the original core members of fierce pussy re-convened to put together a retrospective of their work at Printed Matter in New York City. They produced a remix of their early list poster, which was wheatpasted as an installation in the storefront window of the shop. They also printed it as a postcard. Printed Matter published a book of the early poster work entitled FIERCE PUSSY on the occasion.

2008-10 Lesbian Herstory Archive residency

Mining the Archive, an exhibition

The LHA invited us to present our survey show at the Archive. Given the rich context of the Archives and our relationship to it, we had the desire to expand the exhibition. In addition to showing our previous work, we decided to make new work incorporating material fromthe collection, resulting in Mining the Archive. fierce pussy explored the treasure trove of material at the Archives,  tapping into the cultural legacy of lesbian feminism. Out of millions of objects within the collection, fierce pussy selected a few things that speak to their own history of collective activism and artmaking. Let’s Face It We’re All Queer, hundreds of buttons fan out, circles within a circle, forming a centrifugal spiral. In another piece, We Recruit, T-shirts have been arranged to form an ascending lavender triangle to form a(her)story of lesbian activism. In never before published,  fierce pussy produces a sly and provocative re-reading of lesbian pulp novels.

fierce pussy Salons at the Archive

In an attempt to create an intergenerational and interdisciplinary conversation, we held a series of salons in which we invited a number of artists to join us at the Archive. Participating artists:  Barbara Hammer, Sarah East Johnson, Emma Heddich, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Kate Eichorn, Linda Matalon.

2009 gutter 

gutter grew out of our residency at the Archive. Working with their vast collection of lesbian pulp novels (1940s--1970s)  we excerpted and redacted a number of texts to reveal alternate narratives. We were interested in the malleability of language, the relationship between reading, editing and authorship, and the activity of reading as a place, or space,in which we locate and explore our desire.  The first iteration of ‘gutter’ was in the exhibition “Tainted Love”  at La Mama Galleria (2009).  In the adjacent alley, Extra Place, we wheatpasted a block-long ‘mural’

2009 Bathroom Project at the LGBT Community Center, 

fierce pussy made a permanent installation “Are you a boy or a girl?” in the all-gender bathroom at the New York LGBT Center as part of the exhibition “Then and Now”

2009 fierce pussy residency at Harvard University during ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS, 1987–1993

Working closely with the curators of this landmark exhibition, Helen Molesworth and Claire Grace, we arrived at a number of different ways to engage with the exhibition and the student body. Several of our posters were on display in the gallery, piled high in stacks, so that viewers could take a poster away with them.   We revisited other early projects; working with a team of volunteer undergraduates, we wheatpasted bathrooms throughout the Carpenter Center and the Sackler Museum. We installed a second iteration of ‘gutter’ in the public lobby of the Graduate School of Design. We gave a presentation and conducted a discussion with students at the Women’s Center, and we participated in the symposium which allowed us to look back at AIDS activism and connect our past experience to contemporary political issues.

2010 Get Up Everybody and Sing

When the ACT UP exhibition traveled to White Columns in New York, it was clear to us that we wanted to make a new work that explored mourning and loss as an ongoing experience, one that continues today rather than residing only in the past.  Using the recurring phrase “if he/she were alive today….” we conjure our dead friends, comrades and lovers going about various common activities: texting, flirting, laughing, talking, dancing etc. Accompanying the wall text, we placed a three-foot stack of the lyrics to the gay dance anthem “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge as a takeaway.    

2013 For The Record

For The Record by fierce pussy for Visual AIDS was a series of newsprint posters, stickers, postcards and downloadable broadsides, along with an exhibition at Printed Matter for the 24th annual Day With(out) Art 2013. For the Record mourns the loss of friends, family, lovers, artists and activists during the AIDS crisis and engages in a dialogue about the erasure of personal and collective memories from the historical record through this loss. Through poignant and powerful variations of the phrase “If he/she/they were alive today…,” fierce pussy explores the daily aspects of living not only with HIV/AIDS, but as a person in the world, and asks viewers to extract their own memories to consider our personal and social relationship to the AIDS crisis in the present.