Tina Girouard Helped Make SoHo a Scene. Now, Her Legacy Emerges from Obscurity

For decades, the New York art world overlooked video, textile, and performance artist Tina Girouard (1946–2020), whose presence had been integral to the city’s SoHo art scene during the 1960s and early 1970s.  Now, however, Girouard’s legacy is getting a much-deserved second look in a comprehensive exhibition at the New York’s Center for Art Research and Alliances (CARA), organized with the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought in New Orleans.

“Tina Girouard: Sign In” represents a long-overdue recognition of the Louisiana native’s four-decade career and spotlights Girouard’s place at the heart of that avant-garde SoHo art scene in the relatively brief but prolific period from 1969 to 1978. (The show traveled to New York from the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.)

“She was part of a terrifically influential [group], in terms of the arc of contemporary art culture, together with Joan Jonas, and Laurie Anderson, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Gordon Matta-Clark…” Andrea Andersson, the Rivers Institute’s founding director and chief curator, told me.

The CARA exhibition is part of a big moment for the late artist, having opened alongside not one but two gallery shows in the city, at Anat Ebgi, which has represented the estate since 2019, and Magenta Plains. Next month, the artist Lucien Smith is opening a revival of FOOD, the SoHo restaurant/art project that Girouard ran with Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, and Suzanne Harris. (Don’t miss the original venture’s menu on view at CARA.)

Girouard played a key role in the formative years of notable art organizations and movements such as the Kitchen, Creative Time, PS1, and alternative art space 112 Greene Street (now known as White Columns) in New York; the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia; Matta-Clark’s Anarchitecture Group, and the Pattern and Decoration movement. She also showed with Holly Solomon Gallery.

The incredible breadth of her output may actually have worked against her.

“When artists are multifaceted, they can’t be pigeonholed,” Magenta Plains cofounder and director Olivia Smith told me. “People lose interest in trying to tell their story because it’s more complex.… Tina can be known as a Pattern and Decoration artist, but she can also be known as a pioneer of video art. There’s not a lot of artists you can say that about!”

Girouard studied art at the former University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette), where she met her future husband, photographer, composer, and saxophonist Richard “Dickie” Landry, who would go on to join the Philip Glass Ensemble. (The two married in 1971).

The couple moved to New York City together after Girouard’s graduation and began living with painter Mary Heilmann in a loft at 10 Chatham Square. The building soon became something of an informal artist colony of up to 30 residents. Girouard would cook gumbo and other Southern meals for the various creatives passing through the studio, reflecting the spirit of collaboration and community that permeated her practice.

“There was a thin line between her work and her life—it was almost nonexistent,” Manuela Moscoso, CARA’s artistic director and executive director, told me.

“General Girouard,” as the artist was known, “was a leader in the community in the avant-garde scene in the ’70s,” Smith added. “Tina brought her Cajun traditions of the home to New York City—the kind of  of a big family feast and dancing and music. Her Chatham Square loft served as a symbolic home for this growing community of artists.”

That hospitality extended into Girouard’s art, not only through her work at FOOD—an ahead-of-its-time restaurant that surprised diners with seasonal ingredients, “health food” and unfamiliar dishes like sushi—but with other projects, like the series of “Houses” she created in 1971.

These conceptual spaces included . Girouard created the outline of a home by sweeping the dirt and detritus on a condemned pier—normally a refuge for the homeless—underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Local children, unprompted, scavenged furniture from the trash to complete the installation. The piece, documented in photographs at CARA, was part of “The Brooklyn Bridge Event,” curated by PS1 founder Alanna Heiss for the civic engineering marvel’s 88th anniversary.

CARA is also showing , a sculptural installation Girouard created at Chatham Square using objects left behind by party guests and musicians who had been there for rehearsals. Visitors to the studio were free to interact with and sit on the piece, a two-story “home” with a cot beneath a hanging wooden platform upon which sat an open suitcase.

In addition to this literal homemaking, Girouard also turned to a variety of domestic materials, including wallpaper, linoleum, and even tin ceilings and fabric to make work.

“Tina was really coming of age during second-wave feminism and was very vocal about women’s labor and domesticity and the fact that she used that as fodder for her Conceptual art,” Smith said.

Girouard inherited a collection of vintage 12-by-three-foot silks from a relative in the dry goods business named Solomon Matlock. She would employ these eight bolts of pastel, floral fabrics, which she christened Solomon’s Lot, in various performances and art installations.

CARA has restaged  (1972), the architectural installation of four of the silks from Girouard’s first solo exhibition, “Four Stages,” at 112 Greene Street.

Another length of silk hangs in a loop in the stairwell, in a nod to Girouard’s performance (1977) at Documenta 6, in Kassel, Germany.

“She washed this exact fabric and four others in the Fulda River, and suspended them in the trees to dry, where they became camouflaged,” Andersson said. “It was a collective ritual practice.”

The show also includes a video (1973), showing Girouard washing these fabrics. (Another video in the Maintenance” series, on view in the opening gallery, is of the artist giving herself a haircut.)

Girouard retired t after her 1977 performance at the New Orleans Museum of Art for “Five from Louisiana,” featuring Lynda Benglis, Robert Rauschenberg, Keith Sonnier, and Landry. Anat Ebgi started its relationship with the artist by restaging the piece at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019.

The gallery’s current show centers around Girouard’s 1970 performance , in which she recorded sequences of numbers, words, and phrases on a tape loop, speaking into a microphone. In addition to photographic and video documentation, the gallery staged several performances of the piece during its run.

At Magenta Plains, the focus is on Girouard’s interest in visual language, exhibiting for the first time her “DNA-Icons,” a group of late-’70s silkscreens, printed on commercial textiles at the Fabric Workshop. These bear series of simple line-based symbols, from among a set of 400 devised by the artist. (Related works, both on paper and fabric, are on view at CARA.)

“She researched international signage and ancient petroglyphs and pictograms,” Smith said. “Tina was trying to create a universal language through these hundreds of symbols so people could understand the same thing even if they’re coming up at it from different sides. I find that very beautiful and very meaningful.”

Girouard’s remarkably fruitful New York period came to an end when her studio, then on Cedar Street, burned down in 1978. Having lost nearly everything, she moved back to rural Louisiana with Landry, and gradually faded from prominence (although there was an appearance at the 1980 Venice Biennale and a 1983 mid-career retrospective at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City).

She spent the rest of her life far removed from the downtown art scene. In 1990, around the time she and Landry were divorcing, Girouard moved to Haiti.

Inspired by the voodoo culture prevalent both in Louisiana and her new home, Girouard kept a studio in Port-au-Prince for the next five years. The exhibition features sequined and beaded works from this period, which saw her collaborate heavily with Haitian artist Antoine Oleyant.

“The thing is, Tina never stopped,” Smith said. “But New York wasn’t paying attention to the work that she was doing in the South.”

Magenta Plains got involved after Smith was introduced to Amy Bonwell, Girouard’s niece and estate executor, on a Zoom call. Immediately fascinated by the artist’s life and career, Smith suggested a project with the estate to her gallery co-founders, artists Chris Dorland and David Deutsch.

Deutsch, it turned out, had known Girouard well in her New York days, and was immediately on board.

“He said, ‘After their fire on Cedar Street, I invited them to sleep on my floor, and Tina and Dickie Landry cooked a meal in my studio,’” Smith recalled.

Girouard hasn’t had a New York solo show since 2012. But everyone involved in the three current shows agreed that her singular career was ripe for reappraisal. In fact, as the Rivers Institute began working with the artist’s estate, Andersson quickly realized time was of the essence.

Living in rural Louisiana had helped Girouard fall into obscurity. But the weather there had also taken its toll, physically, on her work and archives, which was largely not stored under climate-controlled conditions.

One artwork actually involved transporting the framework of a former general store across Louisiana to Girouard and Landry’s property in the small town of Cecilia to serve as their studio. The CARA show includes photographic documentation of the move, as well as sculptural wall-hanging works made from cut tin ceiling panels that were stored there, semi-exposed to the elements.

“When we first went to go see some of the materials, it really became clear it was already withering,” Andersson said. “We were working on other projects, and frankly this went to the top of the list from a sheer necessity standpoint, or this work would disappear.”

The people who can help tell Girouard’s story are also nearing the end of their lives. The Rivers Institute has been working on an oral history of the artist’s career, but Richard Serra and Lawrence Weiner both died before they could be interviewed.

Fortunately, Girouard’s estate is firmly committed to cementing her long-term legacy. That work began while Girouard was still alive, with Anat Ebgi presenting her last show before her death at its Los Angeles location in 2020. Plans for the current retrospective, and the simultaneous presentations at both New York galleries, began forming three years ago.

“Tina did not know this project was going to happen,” Andersson said. “One of the greatest regrets is that she died without the knowledge that she would have this kind of recognition.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com