The Estate of Tina Girouard

Pattern Recognition

P&D’s long eclipse in mainstream art-historical narratives may explain not only the tenacious grip of formative interpretations but also the lack of in-depth, fine-grained studies of principals such as Girouard, who died last year and whose work commands increasing attention. Her distinctive mode of legitimating decorative practices involved the use of found lengths of vintage fabric, which she manipulated into provisional architectural structures for the performance of dance and ritual ceremonies. —Lynne Cooke

Highlights from ‘With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985’

This 27-minute projection zooms onto Girouard’s lap while she tends a group of floral fabrics which she inherited from her uncle, Sullivan. Throughout the video, she rinses, sews, and folds the materials while the radio in the background plays content that ranges from the time’s popular tunes, advertisement, and political updates. A song from Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of The Moon album is followed by a car dealership advertisement, and we eventually hear the most recent development in the Watergate hearings. “That big ‘a-ha’ moment is critical about the movement’s queering of not only contemporary art but the broader authority,” says curator Anna Katz. —Osman Can Yerebakan

Tina Girouard’s Elevated Patterns

From playing a central part in New York's art scene, to wandering the 'Louisiana swamps and Voodoo societies in Haiti', Girouard was an artist who evolved wherever she went. —Tessa Moldan

Tina Girouard

What distinguished “A Place That Has No Name” was its subtle demonstration of how Girouard synthesized her conceptual and material interests through iteration and collaboration. —Tausif Noor

We Called Her General Girouard

For Girouard, whose work at this time moved fluidly between installation and performance, to provide food and facilitate community was entirely consonant with her art and her cultural identity. —Jonathan Griffin

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–1985

Made in the year between Nixon’s impeachment, reelection, and eventual resignation, and approaching the end of the Vietnam war, Girouard’s video is a subtle rumination on the cultivation of taste in culture (music) and a deep questioning of authority at the intersection of American culture and politics. Maintenance III meditates on a seemingly neutral act: as the artist listens to upbeat tunes on the radio, there is a subtle critical undertone pointing out that the radio, a symbol of mass media, is itself not neutral. —Olivia Gauthier

Tina Girouard (1946-2020)

Tina inspires because she calls one to the challenge of living fully. With Tina, creative energy poured into every act of being human, of being alive, of being—cooking, eating, dancing, talking, making, laughing, crying, loving. —Jessamyn Fiore

A curator’s tribute to Louisiana-born artist Tina Girouard

Perhaps Tina, along with Antoine, Georges, and Edgar, and all others involved in the production of the Vodou flags within the Bondye: Between and Beyond exhibition, were not only collaboratively creating work that honored spirits within the Vodou religion but also using the works and their production as a figurative mirror to explore the essence of each other’s humanity. —Nic Aziz

Tina Girouard, Experimental Artist in 1970s SoHo, Dies at 73

Tina Girouard, a risk-taking artist from rural Louisiana who played a catalytic role in the 1970s SoHo art scene in New York, helping to found the experimental gallery 112 Greene Street and the artist-run restaurant Food, died on April 21 at her home in Cecilia, La. She was 73. —Randy Kennedy

TINA GIROUARD (1946–2020)

A pivotal figure in the 1970s SoHo art scene and its alternative spaces—such as 112 Greene Street and the restaurant FOOD—Girouard’s work included performances such as Pinwheel, 1977, in which the artist acted as both director and performer.

Tina Girouard, 1946 – 2020

Tina Girouard was born in DeQuincy, Louisiana, in 1946. In the 1960s and 70s, she maintained a studio in New York’s Chinatown and actively participated in some of the earliest shows of video and performance art at now iconic independent spaces still operating today: 112 Greene St. (now White Columns), the Clocktower, PS1, Creative Time, Performance Art, and the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. —Daniel Fuller

Tina Girouard, Freewheeling Artist of 1970s New York Scene, Is Dead at 73

Alongside her art stretching across multiple mediums and movements, she helped nurture the New York art community by supporting various significant alternative art spaces. —Alex Greenberger

Whitewall, Anat Ebgi, and The Kitchen Celebrate Tina Girouard at The Miami Beach Edition

This week during Art Basel in Miami Beach, The Miami Beach Edition hosted cocktails and dinner to honor Tina Girouard‘s seminal performance piece Pinwheel at Art Basel’s brand new  sector. Girouard is an American performance and video artist best known as part of the post-minimalist movement in downtown New York in the 60’s and 70’s. —Whitewall

Review: More is more. Why the ‘Pattern and Decoration’ show at MOCA is pure pleasure

Lurking within Girouard’s example is a salient feature of P&D and its awkward history. Domestic materials evoke a traditionally female purview. —Christopher Knight

Bondye: Between and Beyond by Tina Girouard

Tina Girouard doesn’t disappoint. Inspired by the blend of Caribbean, African, and European culture in her own Louisiana hometown, these flags reference a range of international traditions expressed in Vodou, from All Saints Day in France to New Orleans Mardi Gras, and Haitian Kanaval. —Elizabeth Kozlowski

Tina Girouard – Haitian Hand-Stitched Vodou Flags

When Tina Girouard first arrived in Haiti, she began commissioning artists to create beadworks based on her own paintings and designs. As she learned more about the island nation’s art and religion—and developed close, collaborative relationships with Haitian artists. She began introducing more and more Haitian imagery into her work. —Arts & Food

Is Pattern Back in Fashion?

To Judd’s industrially fabricated units, artists such as Tina Girouard offer equally rectilinear strips of commercially available wallpaper, floral-printed and pastel-hued, mounted on muslin as a kind of incidental painting. —Amy Sherlock

Sequined flags depict Haitian Vodou spirits

The exhibit of flags designed and created by Louisiana artist Tina Girouard and sequin artists in Haiti runs through June 16.

Art review: ‘Bondye: Beyond and Between’

During extended visits to her studio in Haiti, where she worked with legendary Voodoo flag makers such as Edgar Jean-Louis and Georges Valris, Girouard fashioned the large beaded and sequined "Vodou drapos" in this expo at the New Orleans Museum of Art. While mostly remaining true to traditional Haitian symbolism, they reveal Louisiana influences as well. —D. Eric Bookhardt

Close Look: Tina Girouard at the New Orleans Museum of Art

During the 1990s, Girouard maintained a studio in Port-au-Prince where she helped create these collective artworks. She has favored exhibiting outside of the gallery system, championing non profits and more community centric spaces. She is also unique in that her work — video, sound, textile, painting, installations — are well represented in private collections of artists, as well as major museums. —Burnaway

Back Home: Tina Girouard at the Acadiana Center for the Arts

"I wandered away from the art world over the past twenty years to the Louisiana swamps and Vodoo societies in Haiti." —Tina Girouard

Tina Girouard | Haitian Sequin Art

The sequin works made by  Tina Girouard are the fruit of several years of collaboration with the Bel Air artists in Haiti. But the works  created during her stay there undeniably carry the mark of the artist. In return, her influence on the artists of Bel Air had the effect of promoting their personal style, as well as encouraging them to sign their work and to deploy the use of sequin art beyond its original function, which was to create sacred ceremonial flags... —LeGrace Benson

Gordon Matta-Clark, Suzanne Harris, and Tina Girouard: The 112 Greene Street Years

Tina Girouard’s colorful installations, constructed from panels of wallpaper, linoleum, and fabric, are scattered throughout the gallery’s exhibition areas. Designed to demarcate smaller spaces inside the vast industrial expanse of 112 Greene Street, these works were also intended to evolve as performance artists interacted with them. —Chase Martin

“Gordon Matta-Clark, Suzanne Harris, Tina Girouard: 112 Greene Street Years”

Tina Girouard’s linoleum floor piece and fabric screens combine ornamental floral patterns with a Minimalist compositional logic that feels almost more than contemporary, despite the fact that their motifs have an air of the anachronistic about them, evocative of early-twentieth-century wallpaper and the Victorian-era art of pressed flowers. —Zachary Cahill

When Eating and Art Became One

In 1971, you didn’t have to be Keith McNally to open a restaurant downtown. "We were all doing it," recalled Girouard, then well known in downtown circles for her Chatham Square loft parties, because we wanted to FOOD was fueled by artists’ desires. —Howie Kahn

112 Greene Street: The Soho that Used to Be

Vito Acconci locked himself in a tiny room with a fighting cock (“Combination,” 1971), which escaped, and had to be trapped by Girouard — whose own piece “Four Stages” (1972) was used as a frame for Mabou Mines performances. —Frances Richard

Anything but Decorative: Robert Gordy and Tina Girouard

Girouard has claimed in an interview that the word “decoration” rarely emerged within the movement itself; the artists of the time thought of themselves as being interested chiefly in patterning. “We were all activists,” she said. “We were just expressing our ideas and our beliefs with whatever materials we could.” —Benjamin Morris

Review: Patterns and Prototypes at CAC

Girouard replaced minimalism’s hard edges with soft sinewy fabric and symbolic content as we see in her large Conflicting Evidence tapestry. A seasoned performance artist, she also collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass and many others who were part and parcel of her exotically patterned life. —Eric Bookhardt

The field and the table: Rosalind Krauss’s ‘expanded field’ and the Anarchitecture group

"Each person [Anarchitecture member]  had his own area of interest. I was interested in the idea of psychological scale in architecture.." —Tina Girouard

112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970 – 1974)

Girouard’s four-panel canopy of flowered fabrics, Air Space Stage, 1972, and matching floor-work, Lie-No, 1973, consisting of four lengths of flowered linoleum, begged to be activated by live bodies, though it wasn’t clear how. —Frances Richard

Tina Girouard: Curated by Susan Rothenberg

Among the high points of Girouard's exhibition history were invitations to international events such as Dokumenta 6 in Germany, the Venice Biennial, Paris Biennial and in 1983, a midcareer retrospective mounted at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City. Albert Raurell, the museum's director, opened the exhibition catalogue with this remark, "Tina Girouard es una artista para los artistas, como se podria afirmar en el caso de Marcel Duchamp." —Michael Swindle

The Wandering Mind: Journals and Diaries: Death Dances in Haiti

"Something within us all is unknowable and unchangeable." —Tina Girouard

You Can Go Home Again: Five From Louisiana

A few days before the opening, Girouard and three others performed her opulent, relaxed, colorful piece called "Pinwheel", which was preserved in the exhibition as a color videotape and cloth canopy sculpture. The piece related to Girouard's "Costumed Portrait" series; to her concern with role-playing, transformation, and their relationship to place; and to her interest in food as art -- and as adjunct to art and life. —Lucy R. Lippard

Five from Louisiana

"I've always thought of the audience as witnesses. They see my self-image, and at the same time they're having the mystery and myth of video taken away. I think the tapes reveal a lot about my attitude to the performer and the experience of performing. I don't think it should be a scary experience." —Tina Girouard

The Bayou Bunch

In New York, the "Cajun crowd" is the life of the party; this month they are stirring things up back home with this New Orleans show of Five from Louisiana... —Barbara Rose