Tina Girouard

Julia Bryan-Wilson

CARA’s retrospective showcases the late artist’s wide-ranging work, from social practice to Pattern and Decoration.

Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN, installation view. Courtesy the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA). Photo: Kris Graves. © Estate of Tina Girouard / Artists Rights Society (ARS).

Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN, curated by Andrea Andersson and Jordan Amirkhani in conversation with Manuela Moscoso, Center for Art, Research and Alliances, 225 West Thirteenth Street, New York City, through January 12, 2025

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Since it opened to the public two years ago, the nonprofit exhibition space and publishing imprint Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) has hosted some of the most compellingly experimental shows to be found within the increasingly consolidated arts landscape of New York City. Burdened by neither a museum’s pressure to bring in large audiences nor a gallery’s demands for marketability, CARA has consistently presented intermedial artistic practices, particularly those that blur the lines between performance and politics, including outstanding solo presentations by Neo Muyanga, Ligia Lewis, and Javier Téllez. Now the institution further makes good on the promises telegraphed in its name with a major retrospective of Louisiana-born Tina Girouard (1946–2020) that emphasizes her engagements with creating art, pursuing research, and forging alliances.

Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN, installation view. Courtesy the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA). Photo: Kris Graves. © Estate of Tina Girouard / Artists Rights Society (ARS). Pictured, far left: Hung House, 1971. Recreated site-specific installation. Center top, hanging from ceiling: Solomon's Lot Fabrics, 1970s.

First shown in New Orleans at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and curated by Andrea Andersson and Jordan Amirkhani (both of the Rivers Institute) in conversation with CARA executive director Manuela Moscoso, Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN is an invigorating glimpse into the practice of an enigmatic figure whose commitment to “lifemaking” means that her art is sometimes barely recognizable as such. Girouard was a crucial participant in the 1970s SoHo scene. Projects like her eight-month, constantly in-process Hung House (1971) established her as a vital engine of anarchitecture (in which undoing, precarity, and flux are not just an exercise but an ethos), albeit one who is still neglected in accounts that tend to lionize her male counterpart Gordon Matta-Clark. Cleaning, inhabiting, and rearranging her apartment constituted the entirety of Hung House; it was at once a 24/7 performance and a site-specific installation. Furnishings were perpetually pushed around or discarded as “whole rooms were moved and removed,” states Girouard’s typed description of the work. “The sculpture was maintained via the rearrangements and activities.” Girouard’s emphasis on the domestic as a series of never-ending tasks thus places her within a definitive feminist genealogy alongside Linda Montano, Martha Rosler, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. The artist’s emphasis on unremunerated making outside of art institutions further raised questions about women’s unpaid labor, aligning her with the contemporaneous formation of the organization International Wages for Housework.

Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN, installation view. Courtesy the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA). Photo: Kris Graves. © Estate of Tina Girouard / Artists Rights Society (ARS).

Girouard was also part of the founding community of the legendary artist-run restaurant FOOD, with Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, and Suzanne Harris. A menu on display in one of the exhibition’s vitrines provides a tantalizing peek into their offerings: anchovy onion pie, canary pudding, shrimp and chicken gumbo. The latter item—gumbo is derived from the Angolan word for okra, which is the dish’s key ingredient—is especially redolent of Girouard’s culinary background as a rural white Cajun in a region of the US deeply influenced by West African foodways as a result of the Afro-Atlantic slave trade. Indeed, cultural mixings fraught with power differentials across racialized lines would become one of the hallmarks of Girouard’s work. These are uneven efforts, especially her invocation of Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous ceremonies (in a performance in Graz, Austria entitled Mass-Transit: Stosz Zeit, 1978) that does not appear to have successfully bridged the large gap between Native artisans and Austrian audiences.

Archival photograph of Tina Girouard in the live performance Mass Transit (Stosz Zeit), 1978. Courtesy Estate of Tina Girouard. © Estate of Tina Girouard / Artists Rights Society (ARS).

When Girouard left New York City and returned to Louisiana in 1979, she documented the process of relocating a corner store onto a different plot of land and turning it into her house and studio (together with her partner Richard “Dickie” Landry). The photos of this art piece, Moving House, some of which feature a white manager overseeing a largely Black construction crew whose bodies are contorted by physical strain, reveal the brutal overlays of class, labor, and race. In stark contrast to the epic photos generated during Matta-Clark’s grander-scaled projects, like Conical Intersect (1975), Girouard’s more quotidian pictures demonstrate how stubbornly anti-monumental her aesthetic remained.

SIGN-IN illustrates how the artist was drawn to pattern in the broadest possible sense, not only as a visual device but as a method of meaning-making, a way to process information and interpret it. Conceptually, she probed grooves of habit, like repeated chores and the monotonous rhythms of gender-based grooming. She also conceived of her art as a form of care and performed acts such as washing clothes ritualistically. In a more formal sense, Girouard was fascinated by language as a series of recurring symbols and developed her own idiosyncratic repertoire of lexicon derived from a wide array of historical sources, including cuneiform and cave paintings. (Another Girouard exhibit, recently on view at Magenta Plains gallery, presented a deep dive into her textile tapestry series DNA-Icons, silkscreened with some of her glyphs.)

Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN, installation view. Courtesy the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA). Photo: Kris Graves. © Estate of Tina Girouard / Artists Rights Society (ARS). Pictured, center: Untitled Tin Ceiling Work, 1978–79. Ceiling tin panels and metallic automotive paint.

Her art is also filled with the overlooked, vernacular, and lowly patterns that surround us and shape our days, including ordinary interior decor like wallpaper, mass-produced linoleum designs, and stamped tin ceilings. As the necessary complement to maintenance, SIGN-IN thematizes neglect, wear, and dilapidation. Thus, Untitled Tin Ceiling Work (1978–79) is shown unrestored, banged up and rusted. In a less-sexist world, Girouard would have long ago been hailed as a forerunner of what is now called social practice, given her many projects that incorporate the participation of everyday people. But she has been rightly recognized for her signature contributions to the Pattern and Decoration movement. The CARA galleries are draped with swooping lengths of 1940s silk floral cloth (Solomon’s Lot Fabrics, 1970s) that Girouard deployed to suggest ancient modes of architecture—textiles were the first mobile shelters—as well as used as a connective tissue that spans eras and locations.

Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN, installation view. Courtesy the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA). Photo: Kris Graves. © Estate of Tina Girouard / Artists Rights Society (ARS). Pictured, background wall image: Swept House, 1971. Archival image reproduction.

Girouard further directly engaged with fabric as a transmitter of histories when she traveled to Haiti in 1990 and became immersed in Vodou beadwork, a tradition for which she had immense respect. For the last decades of her life, Girouard dedicated herself to archiving and amplifying Haitian banners. Recognizing affinities between Afro-Caribbean and Acadian (agrarian French-Louisiana) creative and spiritual practices—an affinity noted by scholars such as Zora Neale Hurston—Girouard embarked upon a collaboration with revered flag-maker Antoine Oleyant, though she never claimed his culture as her own. Their co-created glittering tapestry, Under a Spell (1992), handsewn in Haiti during the tumultuous aftermath of the 1991 coup, is dense with sequins and glass beads. Its central imagery refers to the spirit Dambala, who slithers between past and present, depicted here as a colorful fish-tailed sea creature around which a serpent coils. Placed alongside her earlier investigations into decay, renewal, sustenance, and translation, her banner with Oleyant serves as a reminder of Girouard’s steadfast belief in collective remaking. The most poignant work in the exhibit, Swept House (1971), in which she swept the dirt under the Brooklyn Bridge while children spontaneously joined in, demonstrates how, for Girouard, anarchitecture literally cleared the ground, making way for new relations.

Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of Art History and LGBTQ+ Studies at Columbia University.