Eliana Willis

A self-trained artist who often takes art and art magazines as his subject will get a major museum spotlight this coming winter. In its Projects gallery, which is free to enter, New York’s Museum of Modern Art is staging a show of California painter Marlon Mullen. His first solo exhibition at a major museum, it will, appropriately enough, serve as the premiere for a brand-new work inspired by the cover of the museum’s own publication Van Gogh: The Starry Night, devoted to one of its best-known works.
Featuring 25 paintings from the last decade, the show will include two examples from the museum’s holdings. One untitled 2017 work is based on an Artforum cover showing a work by Kerry James Marshall—which, itself, shows a Black artist holding up a gargantuan palette.
Born in 1963 in Richmond, California, Mullen has since 1986 been based at his hometown’s NIAD Art Center (Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development), which hosts and supports artists with developmental disabilities. It’s part of a network of studios in the Bay Area working with this population, including Creative Growth and Creativity Explored.
After a decade principally working in printmaking, Mullen turned to painting. The Center started receiving steady donations of art magazines in the late 2000s, and Mullen has been working with it extensively ever since.
“He’s committed to the work of painting, thinking about what it is and what it can be, and to an exploration of abstraction that’s deep and resonant,” said Amanda Eicher, NIAD’s executive director, in a phone conversation. “Like many artists, he’s translating pop culture into form and texture and layers in a way that’s extraordinarily sophisticated.” 
Marlon Mullen at work in the NIAD studio. Courtesy of the artist and NIAD.
Examples in the show focus on covers and advertisements from top publications like Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, and Sculpture that feature works by artists as varied as Andy Warhol, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He doesn’t precisely reproduce the source material, but instead uses it as inspiration for graphic riffs in bold shapes and vivid colors. Other works are based on a series of Time-Life books with monochrome covers; the museum’s 2016 The World of Picasso features just the titular words on a blank background.
The show is organized by no less than the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, Ann Temkin, with support from curatorial assistant Alexandra Morrison.
“He’s really identifying his work as an artist with the art world as it’s presented through these publications, so it’s an intense relationship that he’s creating,” said Temkin in a phone call.
“There’s so much artistry,” she added. “If someone were to just say that the technique was copying the covers or advertisements, that would be such a misrepresentation. They’re a starting point in a way, but he makes his own choices.”
Mullen’s work is a notable entry in a long tradition of art that references existing art. Just to name a few examples: Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) sexualized Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1504); Cindy Sherman’s 1990 Untitled (#224) restaged Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus (1593–94); appropriation artists like Sturtevant and Sherrie Levine recreated works by artists from Andy Warhol to Walker Evans; and Louise Lawler creates works showing her and other artists’ work in situ in museums, storage spaces, and collectors’ homes.
Marlon Mullen, Starry Night (2024), displayed with the publication it is based on. Courtesy the artist and NIAD.
Mullen’s work has appeared on major art-world stages before. The 2019 Biennial exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art included an untitled 2018 work depicting an Art in America cover. He’s also had solo exhibitions at in-the-know galleries like New York’s JTT; Adams and Ollman of Portland, Oregon (which represents him); and Brussels’s Sorry, We’re Closed, as well as New York nonprofit White Columns, and many other venues.
Museums have also collected his work, including not only MoMA and the Whitney but also the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and Oregon’s Portland Art Museum.
MoMA itself has a long tradition of showing folk artists, outsiders, and self-trained practitioners. Curator Holger Cahill mounted the 1932 show (just eight years after the museum’s founding) “American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900.” Five years later, William Edmondson would become the first African American artist to have a solo show there; in 2021–22, the museum organized a show of Joseph E. Yoakum. The museum owns examples by some of the best-known artists in this arena, like James Castle, Henry Darger, Thornton Dial, Martín Ramírez, and Bill Traylor.
“One of the things that attracted me to thinking of proposing this as a venue for Mullen’s first solo museum show was the really deep connection to MoMA’s history, going back all the way to the beginning, of looking at the work of artists who—the wording has changed umpteen times—were not in a professional art world market and ecosystem, and instead forged different paths to recognition and visibility,” said Temkin. “MoMA, starting with [founding director] Alfred Barr and Holger Cahill and Dorothy Miller and so many others, from the early days right up to the present, has seen this this strand of creativity as a very vital part of Modern art history.”
“Projects: Marlon Mullen” will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W 53rd St, New York, December 14, 2024 to April 20, 2025. More

“The Louvre’s enigmatic painting par excellence.” That’s how Bernard Dufour, a French abstract painter from the 20th century, once described Pierrot, a 1718-1719 painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau.
He’s not wrong. The painting is mysterious for a number of reasons. For one, it is merely attributed to Watteau, and not all art historians are convinced he is indeed its creator. We also don’t know who commissioned the painting, or what their intention might have been. Depicting stock characters from French-Italian plays known as commedia dell’arte, Pierrot—also known as Gilles—might have hung on a wall, or it might have been used to promote a particular performance.
Then there’s the relationship between the characters themselves. The central figure, a clown character alternatively referred to as Pierrot or Gilles—hence the two titles—is thought to have been based on sketches Watteau made of a young man known as “Vel.” The other figures in the painting also appear in the commedia dell’arte genre, including two lovers, and a captain.
Then there’s the figure on the left, hiding in the clown’s shadow. Referred to by some sources as a doctor, and by others as a grifter called Crispin— both familiar to 18th century European audiences, as he appeared as a Shakespearean character—he rides a donkey and looks directly at the viewer, smiling deviously.
Left, detail from Watteau’s Pierrot , known as Gilles; right: Louis Crepy after Antoine Watteau, Self Portrait of Antoine Watteau © National Library of France.
Though a secondary element of the composition, this shadowy character has temporarily taken center stage as restoration work on the painting— which involved removing its aged, dulling coat of yellow varnish—led to a surprising realization: that his face looks an awful lot like Watteau’s. If this is the case, how does it reinforce (or change) the image’s meaning?
Watteau was born in 1684 in Valenciennes, a French commune close to the modern-day border between France and Belgium. Growing up in the shadow of the Italian Renaissance, he was trained in the Baroque tradition, which is characterized by grandeur, drama, and emotional exuberance, but gradually moved towards the emerging Rococo style, which was like Baroque, but less dramatic, more decorative and colorful. And yet, the style is far from one-note.
Detail of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera (1717). Photo: Collection of the Louvre, Paris.
As art critic Jonathan Jones points out in a 2003 review of the painting written for The Guardian, Pierrot —or Gilles—has all the trappings of a typical Rococo painting: the flowing costumes, idyllic setting, and bright lighting that give off the impression of a nice summer picnic. But there’s also tension at this picnic: while all the other stock characters fulfil their predisposed roles, the eponymous clown “looks back at us: knowing, disillusioned, without a mask.”
Doctor or grifter, Watteau’s self-portrait remains in character, reinforcing the dissonance between ensemble and protagonist. Directing his devious smile at the viewer, he essentially repeats Jones’ point: that what we see on the stage is anything but authentic.
Pierrot is the center of an ongoing exhibit at the Louvre titled “A New Look at Watteau.” Running from October 16, 2024 until February 3, 2025, it’s part of a larger exhibition program titled “Figures of the Fool,” which looks at artists’ representation of one particular stock character: the jester. Spoiler alert: as in Pierrot, he’s not as happy as he seems. More

When Paul Gauguin’s Flowers and Fruit arrived at the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California, in 1939, the then-fledgling institution had no idea what to do with it. The Haggin, after all, was founded as a historical museum, intended to preserve and showcase artifacts from the region’s early settlers. The donation by its patrons, Robert T. McKee and Eila Haggin McKee, of more than 180 European paintings, then, seemed beside the museum’s civic-minded mission—an afterthought. And though the works were put on view, they were treated as such.
That is, until 1957, when the sale of the French artist’s Still Life With Grapefruits (1901) in Paris realized $255,000. The remarkable sum was enough to warrant an item in the New York Times, which the Stockton Evening and Sunday Record duly picked up. “City Possesses Rare Gauguin,” the article trumpeted, before quoting the Haggin’s director, who said the sale “unquestionably enhanced the value” of its own Gauguin. The institution swiftly promoted Flowers and Fruit from its McKee memorial gallery to its front hall in a special display—newly recognized, per its director, as “perhaps the most costly painting in the museum’s collection.”
Flowers and Fruit to the right of the mantle in the McKee Gallery at Haggin Museum, 1939. Photo courtesy of Haggin Museum.
Today, the Haggin’s prized Gauguin has returned, after a spell in storage, to view in another special display. This time round, there was no sale enhancing the painting’s value; rather, in a stunning turn of events, the work has been excluded from the artist’s most recent catalogue raisonné, casting a shadow on its authenticity. Was the still life a Gauguin to begin with? And if it was, why is it no longer?
Those questions go to the heart of The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin, a new book by art historian Stephanie A. Brown, which occasioned the show. In her biography of the painting, Brown traces the canvas’s journey from Paris to California—through smoke-filled auction rooms, a collector’s ornate salon, and a well-networked gallery in London to become the first Gauguin to land in a West Coast institution. “At its core,” she wrote in her introduction, “this is the story of how one object, one stretched length of painted canvas, passed through the lives of different individuals over the course of a century.”
Paul Gauguin seated in front of one of his paintings, ca. 1895. Photo: Hulton Archive / Getty Images.
The undated Flowers and Fruit depicts two vases of roses—one cylindrical and pink, the other deep indigo and plump—sitting on an ochre-colored surface that is scattered with green and red apples. In its bottom-right corner is the inscription, “à l’ami Roy” (to my friend Roy), and the initials “P.G.”
The dedication provided Brown her first lead: Louis Roy, who was in Gauguin’s tight circle of friends and peers. Her deep research surfaces the enigmatic Roy, a painter and art teacher so obscure that historians believed his was merely a pen name or even a hoax. But his very real existence, as Brown found, was often intertwined with that of Gauguin’s: they notably collaborated on a set of prints based on the latter’s Noa Noa woodblocks in the 1890s. Roy was apparently also dear enough to Gauguin to merit the gift of a still life.
After Roy’s death in 1907 at age 44, his collection was dispersed via auction. Flowers and Fruit would pass through the renowned Hôtel Drouot—twice—and New York’s Reinhardt Galleries before ending up in the collection of the McKees. The couple’s purchase of the canvas in 1929, Brown wrote, was “the first in a chain of events that would make the painting disappear from the international art world.”
The McKees’ original receipt recording the purchase of Flowers and Fruit by Paul Gauguin. Photo courtesy of Haggin Museum.
Her use of the term “disappearing” is spot-on, for the painting wasn’t just taken off the art market with its acquisition, but placed in a museum that did nothing to advance its profile, before disappearing entirely from Gauguin’s official catalogue raisonné.
Here, the story’s undercurrent of cultural power comes into focus. The Haggin directors, Brown noted, networked almost exclusively within the Stockton community, per the museum’s focus. “There is no record of their working with art dealers or art historians to learn more about the museum’s collection,” she wrote. “Their work was about the community and about keeping the museum central to it.” Flowers and Fruit was never sent out on loan or included in any touring shows.
So, when Daniel Wildenstein and Raymond Cogniat were compiling their latest catalogue raisonné—rifling through auction records, exhibition catalogs, and other historical archives—they found close to nothing documenting the painting’s provenance, much less its ongoing existence. “They likely did not know that Stockton existed, any more than people in Stockton knew that the Wildenstein Gallery [in Paris] existed,” Brown wrote.
Of course, neither the exclusion of an object from a catalogue raisonné nor its disappearance from the art market negate its authenticity. But Brown is more concerned with how value is defined and determined by the art world, and how a painting’s journey between the realms of the market and museum could radically transform how it is appreciated.
Installation view of “The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin” at Haggin Museum. Photo courtesy of Haggin Museum.
The new exhibition at the Haggin also includes the results of recent scientific analysis on Flowers and Fruit, which did in fact find the canvas accords with what was used in France in the late 19th century. They are revealed alongside documents illustrating the painting’s trip from Paris (including the McKees’ purchase receipt) and prints of Gauguin’s similar still lifes.
The viewer is left to decide, according to the museum’s press release, “what constitutes authenticity.” More meaningfully, they are invited to observe a work suspended between realities, with an incomplete history, its disappearing act just the tip of its story. The canvas “continues to exist in limbo,” Brown noted. “It is at once rooted in its historical connections and adrift from its origins.”
“The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin” is on view at the Haggin Museum, 1201 N. Pershing Ave, Stockton, California, through April 6, 2025. More

“You make up your own mind what to think.” Hew Locke’s voice arrives like a whisper out of nowhere, emanating from speakers suspended throughout his new show at the British Museum in London. The invitation is generous, assuring visitors that they are not here for a scolding. Rather, Locke hopes to start a “conversation,” albeit one that the U.K. has been putting off for as long as possible.
Grand Union Flag and paintings on display at the Hew Locke exhibition at the British Museum. Photo by Simon Ackerman/WireImage.
The British-Guyanese artist hardly need rely on dogma to get his point across. “Hew Locke: what have we here?” lacks the kind of strict narrative structure imposed on most museum shows. Instead, Locke has selected items from the British Museum’s Africa, India, and Caribbean collections; choice loans, and his own artworks to create a dense web of suggestive associations. Beyond this, the objects are left to speak for themselves.
“The exhibition is a collection of little stories that tell something really big,” said Locke ahead of the show’s opening on October 17. “Sometimes the objects may be very tiny.”
This is the case of each brass manilla that were produced in Europe and then used in Africa to buy goods, including enslaved people. Huge quantities were produced in the English city of Birmingham, and in some cases they were smelted down by artists in Benin to produce the Benin Bronzes that would later be looted back to England.
Lower Niger Bronze Industries bells, (900-1500) at “Hew Locke: what have we here?” at the British Museum. Photo by Simon Ackerman/WireImage
One takeaway is that many objects with what Locke calls “messy histories” defy age-old classification systems. For example, the Asante jug was made in England in the 1390s but later it made its way to Africa where it was a highly venerated object in the Asante royal court. It was photographed there in 1884 but, soon after this, returned to England as colonial loot. It has since been shown in the European Medieval galleries.
Traditional display methods had forcefully flattened objects like this into one dimension, but in Locke’s open-plan exhibition concept they are free to exist across multiple overlapping contexts.
While Locke has avoided including depictions of violence against people of color, it is heavily implied throughout the show. A particularly stark example is two ornamental brass discs that were looted along with thousands more sacred treasures from Benin City during a massacre by the British in 1897. These battered objects still bear the scorch marks from fires that destroyed the palace.
“The watchers” figures perched on top of installations at “Hew Locke: what have we here?” at the British Museum. Photo by Simon Ackerman/WireImage.
Some of Locke’s trademark extravagance and flair is expressed by new sculptures known as The Watchers, vibrantly dressed figures who peer down at the viewer with curiosity, observing our reactions. The artist himself also addresses visitors with his own yellow labels displayed beside official museum texts.
“My comments are very different, it’s my voice, my way of speaking,” he said. “I would hope that it’s easier to understand.” In some cases, these additions are a provocation, as in the case where Locke describes wood sculptures that the government of Jamaica has requested be repatriated as “Jamaica’s Elgin Marbles.”
A North Carolina Algonquian werowance (leader) by John White. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Some exceptionally rare drawings from the late 16th century by John White record but also exoticize North Carolina Algonquian people and present the “New World” as a land of plenty that is ripe for exploitation. Locke has exemplified the real world consequences of this by staging the works alongside objects like a Akawaio feather headdress and a necklace containing seven stuffed hummingbirds.
He also weaves in his own biography, noting in the wall text how he once travelled out of Guyana on a steamer filled with caged macaws and parakeets being “shipped out for the exotic pet trade. Every morning somebody would go through the cages and toss out the dead birds.”
Silver-gilt dish set with gold pendant at the Hew Locke exhibition in The British Museum. (Photo by Simon Ackerman/WireImage)
Born in Edinburgh in 1959, Locke moved to Guyana at the age of five, just in time to see the country gain independence in 1966. Witnessing the formation of a national identity via a new flag and anthem instilled in Locke a keen interest in symbolism and its relationship to power. He returned to the U.K. to study in the 1980, the same year he began regularly visiting the British Museum.
“What it felt like then was, this is a big establishment institution and I’m small,” said Locke. “There’s no place for me in this. I can appreciate it but it’s not anything that I can partake in.” And in more recent years? “Then it became, well, this is my stuff. I’m paying taxes. I own this. I have a share in it along with everybody else. This stuff is part of my heritage.”
Locke was an obvious pick for the British Museum, in what is clearly an effort to address the longstanding controversies around its collection without making any major concessions.
Over the past few decades, the artist has become a hit with museum audiences for his glittering spectacles that draw us in before redirecting our attention towards Britain’s colonial past. In 2006, he dressed a bronze statue of the slave trader Edward Colston—yes, the one torn down during a BLM protest in Bristol in 2020—in golden cowrie shells, which were once exchanged for enslaved Africans.
Installation view of the “Entangled Pasts, 1768–now. Art, Colonialism and Change” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, showing Hew Locke, Armada (2017–19). Photo: © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry. © Hew Locke. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024.
The floating fleet of ships in Locke’s Armada (2017-19) was the highlight of the Royal Academy’s “Entangled Pasts” exhibition. Each vessel represents a moment in history, from the Mayflower of 1620 to HMT Empire Windrush, bringing Caribbean passengers to Britain in 1948, and today’s cargo ships. Together, they capture the complex systems that underpin our globalized world. In 2022, two golden trophies for the Met’s Facade Commission invoked the violent ways in which many major museum collections are amassed.
Though Locke’s works inspire dialogue over straightforward judgement, the decision to invite him into the British Museum’s storerooms may still strike some as brave. How many more “messy histories” can the museum possibly want uncovered? Not least now it is being haunted by its more recent past.
“Fifteen years ago, people may have had a conversation about a show like this after a few bottles of Prosecco, then thought ‘forget that, it’s never happening’,” said Locke. “It is quite a bold thing.” Before accepting the offer, he had some reservations. “I said look, I’ve got opinions and a practice that I need to protect. You’ve got things you need to protect. Let’s see where we can meet.”
Hew Locke, Indra Khanna, & Isabel Seligman in the British Museum’s Prints & Drawings Study Room, 2024. Photograph © Richard Cannon.
He added that he and his partner, the curator Indra Khanna, greatly enjoyed the experience and received useful suggestions from museum staff. “We weren’t treated like terrifying people who came in to slash and burn,” he joked.
In the show’s epilogue, Locke wanted to acknowledge his own position in the establishment by presenting his Order of the British Empire (OBE) medal, which he wishes stood instead for “Order of British Excellence.” It is installed beside a cast replica of an Ife head, made by British Museum in the 1940s when the original was on loan from the Ife National Museum in Nigeria. “It may not be ‘real,’ but maybe that’s okay,” said Locke in an accompanying wall text. “Could replicas replace restituted objects in museums?”
It’s not the artist’s job to give us the answers but, in “What have we here?,” Locke encourages us to keep asking questions.
“Hew Locke: what have we here?” is on view at the British Museum in London through February 9, 2025. More

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.)
Richard Landry, photo of Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, and Gordon Matta-Clark in front of Comidas Criollas, which was soon to become FOOD. Matta-Clark wrote the new name on the print. Photo ©2024 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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!”
Transparency of Tina Girouard’s Pinwheel, staged for the exhibition, “Five From Louisiana,” curated by William Fagaly at the New Orleans Museum of Art in New Orleans, Louisiana, 1977. Photo by Richard “Dickie” Landry, courtesy of the estate of Tina Girouard.
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.
Photo of Richard “Dickie” Landry and Tina Girouard at 10 Chatham Square in New York (ca. 1970s). Photo by an unknown photographer. ©the estate of Tina Girouard.
“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 joie de vivre of a big family feast and dancing and music. Her Chatham Square loft served as a symbolic home for this growing community of artists.”
Andrea Andersson and Manuela Moscoso at CARA’s Tina Girouard exhibition. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
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 Swept House. 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.
Photos of Tina Girouard, Swept House (1971) and other work by the artist on view “Tina Girouard: Sign In” at Center for Art Research and Alliances, New York. Photo by Kris Graves. Tina Girouard Art ©the Estate of Tina Girouard/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
CARA is also showing Hung House, 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 Girouard, Hung House (1971) on view “Tina Girouard: Sign In” at Center for Art Research and Alliances, New York. Photo by Kris Graves. Tina Girouard Art ©the Estate of Tina Girouard/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“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.
Installation view of “Tina Girouard: Sign In” at Center for Art Research and Alliances, New York. The hanging fabric sculpture is Air Space Stage. Photo by Kris Graves. Tina Girouard Art ©the Estate of Tina Girouard/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
CARA has restaged Air Space Stage (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 Camoplage (1977) at Documenta 6, in Kassel, Germany.
A display case from “Tina Girouard: Sign-In” featuring photographs of Tina Girouard’s performance Camoplage (1977) at Documenta 6, in Kassel, Germany, washing her Solomon’s Lot silk fabrics in the Fulda River. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
“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 Maintenance III: Sewing, Washing, Wringing, Rinsing, Folding Solomon’s Lot (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.)
Fabric from Solomon’s Lot hangs in “Tina Girouard: Sign In” at Center for Art Research and Alliances, New York. Photo by Kris Graves. Tina Girouard Art ©the Estate of Tina Girouard/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Girouard retired Solomon’s Lot after her 1977 performance Pinwheel 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 Sound Loop, 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.)
Tina Girouard in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Conflicting Evidence, (1980) on view in “Tina Girouard: Sign In” at the Center for Art Research and Alliances, New York. Photo by Kris Graves. Tina Girouard Art ©the Estate of Tina Girouard/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“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).
Tina Girouard’s “DNA-Icons,” made in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, on view at Magenta Plains in “Conflicting Evidence.” Photo courtesy of Magenta Plains, New York.
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.”
Tina Girouard and Antoine Oleyant, Under a Spell (1992) on view in “Tina Girouard: Sign In” at the Center for Art Research and Alliances, New York. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
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.
Photo of Tina Girouard working on a stencil mural (ca. 1980s). Photo by Richard “Dickie” Landry, ©Richard “Dickie” Landry and the estate of Tina Girouard.
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.
Tin ceiling works on view in “Tina Girouard: Sign In” at the Center for Art Research and Alliances, New York. Photo by Kris Graves. Tina Girouard Art ©the Estate of Tina Girouard/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“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.”
“Tina Girouard: Sign-In” is on view at the Center for Art Research and Alliances, 225 West 13th Street, New York, New York, September 20, 2024–January 12, 2025
“Tina Girouard: Conflicting Evidence” is on view at Magenta Plains, 149 Canal Street, New York, New York, September 17–October 26, 2024
“Tina Girouard: I Want You to Have a Good Time” was on view at Anat Ebgi, 149 Canal Street, New York, New York, September 6–October 19, 2024 More

One fall evening in 1966, an audience crowded the 69th Regiment Armory in New York for a curious art happening titled “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.”
Over the course of the night, a series of performances unfolded. Visitors watched Yvonne Rainer direct a group of participants via walkie-talkie to move large objects around a stage; they saw John Cage orchestrate a choir of telephones and radios; and they observed as Frank Stella played tennis with Mimi Kanarek using rackets wired with transmitters. They wound their way through a billowy maze Steve Paxton created with polyethylene sheets. More than 10,000 people attended the 10-day run; critics savaged it.
Audience members walk through Steve Paxton’s Physical Things at “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering” at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, 1966. Photo: Robert R. McElroy / Getty Images.
The event was staged by 10 artists in collaboration with 30 engineers from Bell Labs, intended to showcase the possibilities of marrying their skills. As planning committee member Simone Forti reflected, it was less an art presentation than “a step towards the creation of a situation that will later be important to the making of art.” It’s a prescient observation, as “9 Evenings” would come to serve as a proof-of-concept for the initiative behind it, one that sought to inject technology into art-making.
John Cage sets up telephones for Variations VII at “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering” at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, 1966. Photo: Robert R. McElroy / Getty Images.
Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was in nascent form when “9 Evenings” took place—a cross-disciplinary concept sketched out by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman in collaboration with Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer. Its New York debut spurred its cementing into an organization with the goal of helping artists “achiev[e] new art through new technology,” as Rauschenberg and Klüver wrote in the first E.A.T. newsletter. The group was soon inundated with dozens upon dozens of requests from creatives eager to expand their practices.
“E.A.T. was a phenomenon,” curator Nancy Perloff told me. “Unlike today, it was a resource with a capital R that would allow artists to experiment.”
Lucy Jackson Young and Niels O. Young, Fakir in 3⁄4 Time (1968). Photo: Shunk-Kender. Art courtesy Thomas Young. © J. Paul Getty Trust.
Perloff is one of the masterminds behind “Sensing the Future,” an exhibition at Los Angeles’ Getty Research Institute that revisits E.A.T.’s brief yet meaningful existence. The show, part of PST Art, unfolds across two galleries, with artifacts surfaced from the institute’s archives.
The organization’s early days fill the first room. Detailed here are its founding members’ early art-tech experiments (Rauschenberg’s Dry Cell, for example), as well as E.A.T.’s 1967 collaboration with New York’s Museum of Modern Art on an open call for artworks created with technology (nine works from which were included in the 1968 show, “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age“).
“9 Evenings,” of course, takes up the bulk of the space, its happenings presented in the form of archival photos, videos, and documents. Just as intriguing are the letters that E.A.T. received after the event; blown up and arrayed on a wall, they were sent in by the likes of Hans Haacke, Eva Hesse, Marta Minujín, and David Hinton, all seeking to work with the group. Hesse, for one, was super keen on “chemistry.”
A letter from Hans Haacke, on view at “Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” at the Getty Research Institute. Photo: Min Chen.
“They are a tiny, tiny fraction of what’s in the archive,” said Perloff of these submissions to E.A.T.’s Technical Services division. “The archive has these punch cards, where artists would put down the materials they wanted, and the engineer would then look at that and respond. The requests came from visual artists, composers, poets—E.A.T. was very cross-disciplinary, all the time.”
That was most evident in E.A.T.’s pièce de résistance: its design for the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 Japan World Exposition. The project called on the expertise of 75 artists, architects, and engineers, not counting the labor of American and Japanese construction companies.
Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970. Photo: Shunk-Kender. Floats © Robert Breer/Kate Flax/gb agency, Paris. Fog © Fujiko Nakaya. Courtesy Experiments in Art and Technology. Light Towers © Forrest Myers. © J. Paul Getty Trust.
Once unveiled, the pavilion took the shape of a geodesic dome. To reach it, visitors navigated a cloud of fog sculpted by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya before encountering kinetic dome-shaped robots designed by sculptor Robert Breer and engineer John Ryde.
The pavilion’s interior was far more dramatic: its spherical ceiling was an aluminized mylar mirror, a mammoth 90 feet in diameter, that produced inverted reflections, further animated by lights and sounds coming from electronics installed under the floor. Attendees were also equipped with handheld receiving devices allowing them pick up different audio transmissions as they roamed the dome—the sound of breaking glass in one spot, birdsong in another. Live performances, programmed by artist Tony Martin and choreographer Remy Charlip, further activated the space. The effect was boiled down in the project’s subtitle: World Without Boundary.
Interior of the Mirror Dome at the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, 1970. Photo: © Fujiko Nakaya. Courtesy Experiments in Art and Technology. © J. Paul Getty Trust.
“The Pepsi Pavilion,” Perloff reflected in the show’s accompanying publication, “is emblematic and indeed a capstone of the collaboration between artists and engineers that defined [E.A.T.].”
The sheer effort that went into E.A.T.’s Pepsi Pavilion occupies the second gallery of the exhibition. Photographs, videos, and other artifacts variously spotlight the dome’s architectural design and elaborate sound system. A reproduction of a console allows visitors to recreate the pavilion’s sound-modifying aspects.
The project, alas, cost so much to operate and was so experimental in form that its corporate sponsor, Pepsi-Cola, pulled the plug after a month. E.A.T. was forced to abandon the pavilion.
Installation view of “Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” at the Getty Research Institute. Photo: Min Chen.
But of course, it wouldn’t be the last time artists and engineers attempted such a spectacle. Today’s glut of immersive shows similarly engineer multi-sensory environments (with presumably less overhead), while the fields of art and technology are far from strangers to each other. And the once-radical proposals by E.A.T., which scaled back operations around 1975, don’t seem so unfeasible today.
Consider sound pioneer and E.A.T. member David Tudor’s Island Eye Island Ear (1970), documentation of which caps the exhibition. The environmental work proposed to transform the Swedish island of Knavelskär into an art installation with sound and reflectors, with fog by Nakaya and kites by Jackie Matisse. “It was going to be a kind of concert on the island,” Perloff explained. “They never got it off the ground.”
But they have now. The piece was most recently realized on the Norwegian island of Svinøya, as part of the 2024 Lofoten International Art Festival, following a stop on Kamome Island in Hokkaido. It’ll likely continue to be reimagined into the future.
“Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)” is on view at the Getty Research Institute, 1200 Getty Center Dr #1100, Los Angeles, California, through February 23, 2025. More