Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN

The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) is pleased to announce its fall 2024 exhibition, Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN, in partnership with Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought. This is the first comprehensive retrospective devoted to the Louisiana-born artist Tina Girouard (1946–2020) in New York City and it will be on view at CARA in the West Village from September 21, 2024 to January 12, 2025. 

From the 1970s until her death, Girouard was a dedicated experimental artist, collaborator, and art worker whose practice across mediums deeply informed feminist art, craft, performance, and video of the last century. Alongside her individual creative work, she nurtured and was a part of artist communities and organizations in Louisiana, New York, and Haiti, including the Anarchitecture Group, the interdisciplinary cohort of 112 Greene Street, FOOD restaurant, The Kitchen, P.S. 1, and the Festival International de la Louisiane. 

“I like art to function as a preserve, as a refuge,” wrote Girouard. Girouard’s art honored the spirituality of everyday objects and interactions. Through performance and the construction of shared languages of community and meaning, Girouard habitually “maintained” her materials and collaborators. Her acts of upkeep, including domestic labor traditionally associated with “women’s work,” blurred the boundaries between what she called “lifemaking” and art-making. 

SIGN-IN gathers film, performance, drawing, sequins, textile, and installation to trace Girouard’s practice and legacy across genres and geographies. Together with archival photographs, scores, and preparatory notes, the works assembled in SIGN-IN articulate both Girouard’s profound contributions to the field and her belief in collaboration. Traveling as Girouard did between Louisiana and New York, SIGN-IN holds space for an artist’s legacy too long overlooked.

Alongside the exhibition, CARA will commission a series of texts and interviews for the organization’s online research page. This digital publication will engage with Girouard’s archive and feature contemporary artists and writers, as well as Girouard’s former collaborators, in response to materials on view. This initiative uses the archive as a method, highlighting the ongoing practices of documenting and maintaining an artist’s practice over time.

SIGN-IN at CARA opens on Saturday, September 21 from 4–7pm.

Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN at CARA is curated by Rivers Founding Director and Chief Curator, Dr. Andrea Andersson, and Rivers Curator, Dr. Jordan Amirkhani, in conversation with Manuela Moscoso, CARA’s Executive Director and Chief Curator. SIGN-IN was researched and organized by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, New Orleans. SIGN-IN at CARA was produced by Agustin Schang, with curatorial assistance by Marian Chudnovsky.
 

About CARA
CARA is an arts nonprofit, research center, and publisher that aims to expand public discourses and historical records to reflect art’s abundant pasts, presents, and futures. Through initiatives including publishing, exhibitions, public programs, and fellowships, CARA seeks to challenge dominant narratives and amplify the breadth of arts and culture.
 

About Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought
Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (Rivers) is a non-profit institute for research and publishing, exhibitions and convenings on art of the global diaspora. Based in New Orleans, Rivers recognizes art as forms of thought shaped by geographic, social, political, environmental, and economic histories and commits to research at the confluence of diverse bodies of knowledge.