Nancy Brooks Brody was born in New York on September 9, 1962, to a mother who was a secretary and a father who worked as a buyer in the housewares department at Macy’s. Following her graduation from high school, she enrolled at the School of Visual Arts; she was still a student there when she began exhibiting work, at downtown hot spots including Lucky Strike, Danceteria, ABC No Rio, the Pyramid, and Club 57, in a group show curated by Keith Haring. Solo shows followed at New Math gallery on the Lower East Side; concurrent with her practice, which at the time incorporated clay, wax, and plaster, Brody maintained a day job in the darkroom at Abrams Publishing, where she gained the Photostat skills she would bring to bear in fierce pussy.

As the 1980s wore on and AIDS began to claim the lives of those at the clubs she danced at—she remembered Klaus Nomi as among the first to be lost to the disease—Brody joined ACT UP. “I was interested in how AIDS manifested in women, and how it manifested differently in women,” she told Svetlana Kitto in 2018, during an oral interview for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. After working as what she described as a “foot soldier” for the organization for several years, Brody found herself looking to shift focus slightly. “We wanted to do something a little more joyful,” she told Kitto.

In 1991, she cofounded the lesbian activist group fierce pussy alongside Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka. She would later recall, in a 2019 video interview for Artforum, that the collective’s formation was announced during an ACT UP meeting at Cooper Union’s Great Hall. “We made an open call . . . on the floor that we would be meeting at Zoe’s house at such a night, and come one, come all.”

fierce pussy’s inaugural effort was its “List” posters, an ongoing series begun that night and characterized by the opening phrase “I AM,” followed by a string of derogatory terms used to describe LGBTQ people, or those who did not appear to conform to gender norms, closing with the phrase “AND PROUD.” The first of these, created the night the collective formed, read, “I AM A / lezzie / butch / pervert / girlfriend / bulldagger / sister / dyke / AND PROUD!” Later remixes of these texts, begun in 2008, replaced the closing phrase with “AND SO ARE YOU.”

Among the actions the collective engaged in were creating PSA videos, stickers, T-shirts, and greeting cards in support of LGBTQ rights and visibility; they made avid use of wheat paste, plastering the city with posters advocating for their cause. Other projects included renaming New York City streets in order to elevate the profile of gay people, which they accomplished by stenciling over extant street signs, recasting Hudson Street, for example, as Audre Lorde Lane, and Christopher Street as Tomboy Turnpike. Another 1991 series, “Family Pictures and Found Photos,” paired photographs of the members and their friends as children with bold text reading, “DYKE,” or, “LOVER OF WOMEN.”

Though the collective at various points also included Pam Brandt, Jean Carlomusto, Donna Evans, Alison Froling, and Suzanne Wright, Brody would remain a core member, alongside Episalla, Leonard, and Yamaoka until her death. She maintained an individual practice as well, most recently making photo-based drawing works that responded to the choreography of Merce Cunningham, as well as wall-embedded sculptures made from enameled metal. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; FRAC Haute-Normandie, France; the Centre Pompidou and the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, both in Paris.

“Life is short. It’s really, really, really, really short,” she told Kitto. “It’s not long that we’re here at this time, so enjoy it. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.”