Throughout their lifetime making artwork, Nancy Brooks Brody (1962 – 2023) was engaged in investigating the power of the studio practice as an assertion of an inner self within a tumultuous city and society. Brody was also well known as a founding member of the queer art collective, fierce pussy. Starting in 1991, through their immersion in AIDS activism fierce pussy brought lesbian identity and visibility directly into the streets. Throughout this time, Brody was making their own deeply personal work in the studio, a private space of creative potential. Always in conversation with the legacy of minimalism, Brody created pared-down paintings, drawings, embroidery, sculpture and architectural interventions that emphasized the human hand. Their works require the viewer to look slowly and deeply, whether at white threads stitched into white paper, faint gray webs spreading over pale-washed panels, or strips of lead – bare or painted with monochromatic enamels – embedded into the walls of the rooms they inhabit. Brody’s work celebrates the duality of ephemerality and permanence as a way to examine life, the body, and time.
Courtesy of the Nancy Brooks Brody Estate and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery
