at the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances in New York.
Tina Girouard: 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 gathers film, performance, painting, drawing, sequin, textile, and installation that trace the artist’s ritual care of people, places, and materials. Together with a wealth of archival photographs, scores, preparatory notes, and drawings, the works collected in SIGN-IN articulate both the extraordinary artistic contributions of Girouard and a profound ethos of collaborative artmaking. Girouard’s practice refuses the polarization of fine art and craft, performance and objecthood, public work and private life. SIGN-IN traces the significance of an individual artist’s legacy through a much longer history of signification—the process through which we communicate with one another.
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, Chrissie Iles, 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 Stolbun Family, Stephen Reily and Emily Bingham, The Azby Fund, The Robert R. McCormick Foundation, The Ella West Freeman Foundation, and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. Additional thanks to Nathalie Simon, Elizabeth and William Monaghan, and the Ogden Museum’s host committee members Wayne Amedee, Anonymous, Dathel & Tommy Coleman, Kaye Courington, Dale Fleishmann (in honor of Charles Urstadt), Gabrielle Mizrahi, Carla & Cleophus Thomas, and Therese & William Winslow. 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.
