In 1978 a vicious studio fire led the artist Tina Girouard to move from New York City, where she had been ensconced in the downtown art scene for a decade, back to Louisiana, the state where she was born in 1946. As devastating as the fire was, her pivot home was not a defeat. Girouard, who died in 2020 at the age of 73, was constantly in a state of return—both physically and in broader, more philosophical ways. Crossing time and geographies was a key preoccupation of her multidisciplinary practice.
“This relationship to place, which is not one of permanence but of coming back and leaving, is so ingrained in Tina’s story,” says Andrea Andersson, the founding director and chief curator at the Rivers Institute, a New Orleans–based arts nonprofit. Rivers worked closely with Girouard’s estate and the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA) to organize the retrospective “Tina Girouard: Sign-In,” now on view at CARA’s space in New York City after a run at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.
Girouard explored these concepts of time and place across a wide variety of mediums, from humble domestic fabrics to grand collaborative performances. She was a pivotal if under-recognized figure in the avant-garde art scene in 1970s SoHo, helping launch the influential spaces 112 Greene Street (a precursor to White Columns gallery) and FOOD, the artist-run restaurant she cofounded with Gordon Matta-Clark and Caroline Goodden. (FOOD will get a second incarnation courtesy of the artist Lucien Smith in Chinatown later this fall.)
There are many reasons Girouard isn’t better-known. Some are obvious: she was a woman; she left “the scene.” Yet she also had a practice that was difficult to capture—so much of it was about a spirit of presence and collaboration. She didn’t do one thing. She experimented, explored, assembled. “I believe one’s life is made up of many parts,” Girouard once said, “and that you get your worldview or philosophy by adding up these parts.”
“Sign-In” presents a range of Girouard’s works from 1970 through the 1990s, plus archival materials like photographs, gallery posters, and her extensive notes. Her collaborations with fellow artists of all kinds—painters, beaders, dancers, filmmakers, musicians—also suffuse the exhibition. The ground-level gallery is a veritable Girouard sample platter: exquisite sequin works made with the Haitian artist Antoine Oleyant; the 1970 video piece Maintenance I: Take One Role Change (Part I), showing Girouard cutting her bangs; a blown-up photograph of her 1971 Swept House performance, in which she swept dirt under the Brooklyn Bridge into a rough outline of a house; two fabric works from 1980 hanging side by side called Death, Tina and Death, House; and a grid of 110 of her original pictographs—the key to so much of her pattern- and symbol-laden practice.
“Her work was incredibly profound in the sense of belonging, her ideas of home, her interest in language throughout her life,” says Manuela Moscoso, CARA’s executive and artistic director. In Girouard’s system of symbols, shapes stand in for concepts like “water” (jagged lines), “house” (similar to the outline from Swept House), “death” (a sort of frowning emoticon), and “Tina” (rendered in Braille). Girouard pulled from many ancient ideologies and religions to create her symbols–expressions of her desire for connection across disparate cultures.
A deeper exploration of Girouard’s invented language is simultaneously on view at Magenta Plains gallery, located just a few blocks from Girouard’s first Manhattan apartment, at 10 Chatham Square, in Chinatown. More than a dozen of the artist’s fabric works in her DNA-Icons series, made in 1980 in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, hang across the gallery’s two floors. (The aforementioned Death, Tina and Death, House are from this series.) “For us it was important to kind of be a rabbit hole from the CARA show,” says Magenta Plains director Olivia Smith.
This DNA-Icons series was likely never displayed publicly, Smith says. When Girouard made them as part of a residency at the Fabric Workshop, she was playing with a technique that was new at the time: screenprinting. “It’s very interesting that they’re all on essentially industrial, commercially printed fabrics, and she’s doing this handmade printmaking process over the top,” Smith says. “There’s a conversation between her superimposition of her symbols and the symbols that already exist.” (Playful layering—this time of voices—was the focus of Girouard’s 1970 performance piece Sound Loop, which is being restaged at Anat Ebgi gallery in Tribeca until October 19.)
Back at CARA, two of Girouard’s works highlight how the artist played with the mutability of “home.” Archival images of Moving House, a conceptual performance piece from 1979, show Girouard and her her husband, Dickie Landry, a founding member of the Philip Glass Ensemble and a fellow Louisianan who was deep in the SoHo scene with her, physically moving a house from one plot to another. “She was really into the idea of labor behind making art,” Moscoso says. It’s not just about the fact that she moved this house—it’s about the shared work and the decisions that made it happen. Moving House also circles back to Girouard’s ongoing interest in crossing time and space: “She lived in this place that she displaced herself,” Moscoso says.
Nearby, bolts of floral fabric from Girouard’s Solomon’s Lot hang elegantly from the ceiling. These fabrics were gifted to Girouard by her mother-in-law, and she used them in various installations and performances around the world, including Documenta and the Venice Biennale. The modest, feminine materials are emblems of Girourd’s artmaking, which elevate the quotidian into the sublime with the sheer reverence she gave them.
The same goes for an early untitled work made of tin ceiling tiles, mounted on a wall near the fabrics at CARA. It had been hanging in Girouard’s Louisiana house for decades, and it’s not in the best shape. It’s rusted, and in some spots you can even see where Bubble Wrap left little imprints as it melted in the un-air-conditioned home. “With all its withering across time, it is so powerful, and such a testament to her practice,” Andersson says. “She could use these pedestrian materials and make these subtle interventions, and then they become transformed.”
“Tina Girouard: Sign-In” is on view at CARA through January 12. “Tina Girouard: Conflicting Evidence” is on view at Magenta Plains through October 26.