When: 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 21
Where: University of Oregon, Lawrence Hall, rm 115, 1190 Franklin Blvd, Eugene 97403
Details: In 2024, Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought opened the exhibition, Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN–the first comprehensive retrospective for the Louisiana-born artist, Tina Girouard (1946-2020). Moving between genres and geographies, Girouard invested objecthood with meaning through ritual, performance, role-playing, and community participation. From the 1970s until her death, Girouard played a galvanizing role in the founding and development of communities and organizations, including the Anarchitecture Group, the interdisciplinary cohort of 112 Greene Street, FOOD restaurant, The Kitchen, P.S. 1, the Festival International de la Louisiane, and as a collaborator in artist communities in Louisiana, New York, and Haiti. Her practice indelibly shaped community-engaged, feminist, craft, textile, performance, and video art of the last century and invested New York’s avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s with ritual and vernacular knowledge of the American and global south. And yet, Girouard’s practice has been largely erased from canonical histories of the avant-garde. This lecture places Girouard and her fellow female collaborators at the center of major philosophical shifts in postwar American art, and points to the archives as a site of her defiant, radical praxis of care.
Jordan Amirkhani is Curator and Head of Research and Project Development at Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought—a non-profit organization based in New Orleans, Louisiana committed to research and publishing, exhibitions and convenings on art of the global diaspora. Prior to taking on these roles, Amirkhani held academic positions at American University in Washington, DC, and the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, TN. Recent curatorial projects include Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN (2024); Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul (2023); Troy Montes Michie: Rock of Eye (2022); Yto Barrada: Ways to Baffle the Wind (2021), co-curated with Andrea Andersson; and the2021 Atlanta Biennial: Of Care
Cost: Free
Information: “To and From, Accumulate and Disperse: Tina Girouard in the Archives” details, Visiting Artist Lecture Series
