Pioneering Textile Artist Tina Girouard Is Finally Getting Her Due

At just 25, Tina Girouard was already in the heart (or perhaps the stomach) of New York’s avant-garde. FOOD—the artist-run restaurant tucked away in SoHo that she founded in 1971 with fellow artists Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Gooden, and Suzanne Harris—fed the whole spectrum of artists living in Lower Manhattan at the time, including those at the forefront of Post-Minimalism, Anarchitecture, and the feminist Pattern and Decoration Movement (P&D). The space transformed dining into a performative art, with culinary contributions celebrated by artists like Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage. “Pretty much the whole art community was coming in there at one point,” Girouard once told the New York Times.

Around this time, Girouard contributed to the beginning of 112 Greene Street, the experimental performance studio that became known as White Columns in 1979. Yet, despite her integral role at FOOD and 112 Greene Street, her legacy has rarely been spotlit, perhaps due to her departure from New York in 1978 after a devastating studio fire. Returning to Louisiana, she continued making art on the margins until her passing in 2020 at 73.

Now, for the first time ever, Girouard’s pioneering work in performance, textile, text-based, and video art will be the subject of a comprehensive retrospective in New York at the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA). “SIGN-IN,” first staged at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art this summer, is curated by the New Orleans–based Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and will be on view until January 12, 2025. Meanwhile, two New York gallery shows are running concurrently: “I Want You to Have a Good Time” at Anat Ebgi, on view until October 19th, and “Conflicting Evidence” at Magenta Plains, on view until October 26th.

Girouard’s early life

Born in DeQuincey, Louisiana, in 1946, Girouard earned a BFA in fine art from the University of Southwest Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana–Lafayette) in 1968. It was there that she met the Louisiana-born saxophonist Dickie Landry, whom she would later marry in 1971. Growing up in rural Louisiana, Girouard never strayed far from her hometown.

“Her commitment to the notion and the idea of maintenance is so foundational and fundamental to everything she’s doing,” said Andrea Andersson, founding director of the River Institute. Often, these experiences guided her performance pieces, such as her “Maintenance” video series (1970–76), where she performed daily domestic tasks such as cutting her hair or doing laundry.

“Frankly, it’s a rural imperative. You don’t just toss it out—you sew it, you mend it, you put it back into circulation,” said Andersson. “That was Tina’s operation across her practice: to take care of something and give it perpetually new life.”

Girouard’s social scene in New York City

A pair of newly minted college graduates, Girouard and Landry moved to New York in 1969, settling into an apartment in Chinatown with painter Mary Heilmann. Their loft quickly became a hub for avant-garde artists, musicians, and performers, particularly attracting a community of Louisiana-born artists, including Lynda Benglis and Keith Sonnier.

While in New York, Girouard performed in projects for artists such as Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner, and Laurie Anderson. Meanwhile, she started a series of installations she called “houses”—the first of which was Hung House (1971), first shown in her apartment and then at 112 Greene Street. This installation featured a two-story sculptural arrangement of detritus and abandoned belongings gathered from the building, emphasizing how the most modest materials can still create spaces where people can gather.

All the while, Girouard was working on her “Wallpaper and Test Pattern” textile series, challenging traditions around domestic labor and materials traditionally associated with women’s lives. Works from these series, such as the quadrant textile work Screen 4 (1974–75), are on view at the CARA.

Then, in 1972, she mounted her first solo exhibition at 112 Greene Street, “Four Stages.” A standout piece from this exhibition, Air Space Stage (1972), which is currently on view at CARA, involved four sheets of patterned fabric suspended from the ceiling. Performers interacted spontaneously with the movable pieces, adjusting and manipulating them. In this work, Girouard applied innovative performance techniques to decorative textile work reminiscent of P&D founders Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff, with an architectural sensibility that echoed her close collaborator Matta-Clark’s explorations of space and structure.

An underrecognized performance artist

Girouard was at the forefront of performance art from the moment she stepped into New York. One early example, Sound Loop (1970), featured a single performer speaking into a microphone to record sequences of numbers, words, and phrases on a tape loop. The recording process continued as the multiple rerecordings were progressively layered on top of each other until they merged into an indistinguishable density of sound. An archival video is currently on view at Anat Ebgi, which will be restaging the performance during the show.

“It’s not necessarily about this performance that exists only at that moment…but rather the structure—creating this idea of something that can be mutated, something that can shift, something that can be reperformed, something that can fundamentally change within parameters,” said Stefano Di Paola, partner and director at Anat Ebgi.

It is perhaps Pinwheel (1977) that best captures Girouard’s ritualistic approach to performance art. Originally performed in 1977 in New Orleans and restaged in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach, Pinwheel features four performers who create a stagelike environment in four quadrants using numerous yards of decorative silk fabric. Each performer follows detailed instructions written by Girouard, directing them to perform set rituals or manipulate objects within their quadrant. “She is constantly feeding back into her system the new things that she learned, layering with the things that she was perhaps gifted by birth and family and culture and region, and then assimilating new knowledge,” said Andersson.

Late life, homecoming, and Haiti

A devastating fire destroyed much of Girouard’s studio in New York in 1978, prompting her and Landry to return to Louisiana. In the immediate years, Girouard staged her final show at Holly Solomon Gallery and performed at the Venice Biennale in 1980. She was honored with a mid-career retrospective at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City in 1983. Yet after these milestones, she received waning attention from the national art world, and she shifted to a more regionally focused practice.

In 1986, Girouard was instrumental in founding the Artists’ Alliance in Lafayette and established the Festival International de Louisiane. This international festival amalgamated music, dance, theater, visual, and culinary arts from francophone countries—including Haiti. Girouard developed an affinity for the textile work of Haitian artists, so she traveled to Port-au-Prince. There, she met Antoine Oleyant, with whom she would collaborate to create works from sequins and beads, such as Under a Spell (ca. 1990).

Tragically, Oleyant passed away in 1992, which, in turn, deepened Girouard’s ties to his community in Haiti. She kept a studio in Port-au-Prince until 1995, working alongside renowned sequin artists like George Valris and Edgar Jean-Louis, returning, in some ways, to the themes of her early P&D work.

A legacy on the periphery