This exhibition review examines Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) as both art historical corrective and methodological proposition for how institutions might approach collaborative artistic production. The retrospective recuperates Girouard from the margins of 1970s downtown New York experimental art, where her contributions to pivotal projects like FOOD and institutions like 112 Greene Street have been systematically overshadowed by more celebrated collaborators.
The exhibition demonstrates how Girouard's practice extended beyond conventional notions of artistic collaboration between people to encompass what she termed "collaboration with materials"—treating fabric, linoleum, wallpaper, and video feedback systems as active participants in meaning-making rather than passive media. Through her innovative video experiments at Chatham Square Studios, particularly the spatial feedback systems of her Video Loop pieces, Girouard anticipated later explorations of surveillance and mediated self-perception while developing a unique pictographic language system.
The exhibition traces her geographic and artistic trajectory from pioneering video work in New York through her return to Louisiana and engagement with Haitian sequin artists, revealing how her practice of "maintenance" extended beyond material concerns to encompass the maintenance of creative communities and alternative institutions. Girouard's case provides an instructive example of how collaborative works are attributed and historicized, demonstrating how the most visible participant often becomes the singular avatar for endeavors that were the work of many hands.
The full review is available in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism Vol 52, issue 2, or as a PDF here.
Afterimage (2025) 52 (2): 72–76.
“I’m collaborating with the fabric or the linoleum or the wallpaper.…I think my ability to collaborate with people has allowed me to collaborate with materials.”