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FIERCE PUSSY: SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATION
October 15—December 23, 2009
Opening reception October 15, 2009
following the 6 pm Carpenter Center lecture
Four central members of the artist collective Fierce Pussy will participate in a 3-day activism and print media workshop, as well as a site-specific installation, with Harvard College undergraduate students.
Fierce Pussy is a collective of queer women dedicated to creating public art and direct action addressing issues of lesbian identity and visibility. Emerging in 1991 through its members’ immersion in AIDS activism during a decade of increasing political mobilization around gay rights, Fierce Pussy brought lesbian identity directly into the streets. Calibrating the visual language of their art to the urgency of those years, the collective’s art production relied on modest and readily available resources: old typewriters, found photographs, its members’ own baby pictures, and the printing supplies and equipment accessible in their day jobs. Lo-tech, low budget, and ubiquitous, Fierce Pussy’s wheatpasted posters and crack-and-peel stickers peppered New York City through the early 1990s. In other actions, the collective used stencils and spray paint to rename New York City streets after prominent lesbian heroines, and engaged in an iconoclastic greeting card campaign directed at Cardinal O’Connor and Senator D’Amato.
Most active between 1991 and 1995, Fierce Pussy has reconvened in recent years to create new works that reframe the collective’s vital message for the present moment. During their residency, Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka will work with students to develop visual material addressing issues of gender and sexuality at Harvard and beyond. Fierce Pussy’s residency will also offer an unusual opportunity for students to learn strategies for radical political organizing and collective art production from some of the most experienced and influential women artist-activists at work today.
Site-specific installations by Fierce Pussy will also be located at the Harvard Art Museum/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 486 Broadway, Cambridge, MA, and the Gund Hall Gallery at the Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA.
This project is sponsored by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard Art Museum, Harvard College Women's Center, and the Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Fund through “Learning from Performers,” a program of the Office for the Arts at Harvard University.