Between ritual and everyday life: Tina Girouard at the Tamayo Museum

This is the first major posthumous retrospective dedicated to Tina Girouard (1946–2020), a Louisiana-born artist, bringing together a diverse practice that includes performance, video, textiles, drawing, and installation. Her work explored the connections between art, community, ritual, and the dimensions of care in everyday life. It premiered at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans in 2024, then traveled to the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) and will open from May 21 to September 14 at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, curated by Manuela Moscoso, Andrea Andersson, and Jordan Amirkhani.

The first major posthumous retrospective dedicated to Louisiana-born artist Tina Girouard (1946–2020) offers a comprehensive review of a career characterized by a diversity of media and approaches. Throughout her career, Girouard transitioned effortlessly between performance, video art, textiles, drawing, and installation, shaping an artistic language that transcended traditional categories. Her work is distinguished by the way it establishes a constant dialogue between individual creation and collective dynamics, positioning art as a space for encounter, shared ritual, and reflection on everyday care.

In this sense, the exhibition "Sign-in" not only recovers the breadth and formal richness of his output but also highlights the social and cultural dimension of his practice. Girouard understood the artistic act as a web of relationships—between bodies, communities, and environments—that challenged the hierarchies of established art and paved the way for alternative modes of creation and coexistence. The retrospective thus allows us to understand the relevance of his legacy in the context of contemporary art, while illuminating art's capacity to activate memories, rituals, and gestures of care that traverse the intimate and the collective.

In the late 1960s, Girouard moved to New York, the capital of the art world at the time, and there she became associated with artists such as Lynda Benglis and Dickie Landry, whom she married. Her Chinatown apartment was the site and epicenter of multiple cultural and creative encounters. She worked with non-traditional media (wallpaper, linoleum, textiles, sequins, steel); her aesthetic is often linked to the Post-Minimalism, Anarchitecture, and Pattern & Decoration movements. In 1970, she co-founded the art-restaurant FOOD, where cooking and eating were also performative acts.

“I tend to think of art as a refuge, as a space of shelter,” Tina Girouard once wrote. By blurring the boundaries between public and private spaces, the artist shaped ephemeral shelters that functioned as places of encounter and protection. In the structures she conceived, each element took on a sacred character: the arrangement of people, materials, and signs was not limited to a simple sum of parts, but generated meaningful configurations capable of producing new forms of community and aesthetic experience.

Among the most significant pieces in the retrospective are works that offer a journey through the multiple facets of Tina Girouard's practice. Moving In–Moving Out–Sign-In (1976), a participatory installation presented at the inaugural Rooms at MoMA PS1, documented the presence of collaborators and agents from the New York art scene, becoming a living record of the creative community of the time. Additionally, Four Stages (1972) recreates her first solo exhibition at 112 Greene Street, using fabrics from the “Solomon's Lot” series and wood reclaimed from warehouses, emphasizing her interest in assemblage, the reuse of materials, and the construction of immersive environments.

The exhibition also foregrounds Girouard's textile research through the series Wallpaper and Test Pattern , in which manual labor associated with the domestic is transformed into a field of formal and aesthetic experimentation, questioning the hierarchies between the private and the artistic. Finally, films such as Pinwheel (1977) and the videos from the Maintenance series (made throughout the 1970s) are included, in which Girouard explores the performativity of everyday, ritualized tasks, revealing the political and poetic power of care and repetition in daily life.

Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN is presented as a sweeping retrospective that recovers and celebrates the legacy of a creator ahead of her time. Her work, marked by performativity, symbolic weaving, care, and an ethic of solidarity, unfolds in a journey that connects New Orleans, New York, and Mexico City, highlighting how Girouard transformed the everyday into an artistic act of collective resonance. The exhibition not only restores her place in the history of contemporary art but also invites us to recognize the relevance of her collaborative poetics as a critical and sensitive horizon for the present.