at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, MX.
SIGN-IN is the first comprehensive retrospective for the Louisiana-born artist, Tina Girouard (1946-2020). Moving between genres and geographies, Girouard invested objecthood with meaning through ritual, performance, role-playing, and community participation. From the 1970s until her death, Girouard played a galvanizing role in the founding and development of communities and organizations, including the Anarchitecture Group, the interdisciplinary cohort of 112 Greene Street, FOOD restaurant, The Kitchen, P.S. 1, the Festival International de la Louisiane, and as a collaborator in artist communities in Louisiana, New York, and Haiti. Her practice indelibly shaped community-engaged, feminist, craft, textile, performance, and video art of the last century and invested New York’s avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s with ritual and vernacular knowledge of the American and global south. And yet, Girouard’s practice, has been largely erased from canonical history.
SIGN-IN presents the full arc of Girouard’s practice, articulating the artist’s lifelong inquiries into retooling materials and co-creating spaces.
Central to Girouard’s practice was the notion of “maintenance,” a process of upkeep that recognized and affirmed the spirituality of everyday objects and interactions. The artist’s habitual and ritual acts of maintenance extended to domestic labor traditionally associated with “women’s work.” For Girouard each space, whether domestic or artistic, was a site of possibility for re-imagining how to expand ideas of collectivity across art worlds.
“I like art to function as a preserve, as a refuge,” wrote Girouard. Blurring the boundaries between her public contexts and private lives, she built and maintained such temporary refuges. In the structures that Girouard created, the elements were sacred and every organization of people, materials, and signs was more than the sum of its parts.
In coordination with the exhibition, Rivers is proud to partner with Dancing Foxes Press for a long overdue publication that pairs Girouard’s archive with newly commissioned essays by Jordan Amirkhani, Andrea Andersson, Aruna D’Souza, Anaïs Duplan, Pamela M. Lee, and Lumi Tan.
This exhibition is made possible by the lead research, publication, and exhibition support of The Helis Foundation, as well as the generosity of Teiger Foundation, Every Page Foundation, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the Rosa Mary Foundation, the Selley Foundation, the Stolbun Family, Stephen Reily and Emily Bingham, the Azby Fund, the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, the Ella West Foundation, and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. Additional thanks to Nathalie Simon and Elizabeth and William Monaghan. We extend our appreciation to all of the lenders, to Anat Ebgi Gallery and Magenta Plains Gallery, and to our Board of Directors. We extend our deepest thanks to Amy Bonwell, Executor of The Estate of Tina Girouard, who has provided unending care for the artist’s practice, commitments, and legacy.
This exhibition was first on view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans from March 16, 2024 to July 7, 2024. Rivers partnered with the Center for Art, Research and Alliances to present the exhibition in New York (September 20, 2024 to January 12, 2025) and again at the Museo Tamayo (May 21 to September 14, 2025).
