In 1978 a vicious studio fire led the artist Tina Girouard to move from New York City, where she had been ensconced in the downtown art scene for a decade, back to Louisiana, the state where she was born in 1946. As devastating as the fire was, her pivot home was not a defeat. Girouard, who died in 2020 at the age of 73, was constantly in a state of return—both physically and in broader, more philosophical ways. Crossing time and geographies was a key preoccupation of her multidisciplinary practice.
“This relationship to place, which is not one of permanence but of coming back and leaving, is so ingrained in Tina’s story,” says Andrea Andersson, the founding director and chief curator at the Rivers Institute, a New Orleans–based arts nonprofit. Rivers worked closely with Girouard’s estate and the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA) to organize the retrospective “Tina Girouard: Sign-In,” now on view at CARA’s space in New York City after a run at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.