Sign-in is the first comprehensive retrospective devoted to the artist Tina Girouard (b. Louisiana, USA, 1946–2020). Girouard was a dedicated experimental artist, collaborator, and art worker, whose practice contributed to feminist movements in art, craft, performance, and video. She was also, in 1983, the first woman to stage a solo exhibition at the Museo Tamayo, Vámonos a México. Over forty two years later, Sign-in presents the full arc of Girouard’s practice, articulating the artist’s lifelong inquiries into retooling materials and co-creating spaces.

Central to Girouard's practice was the notion of “maintenance,” a process of upkeep that recognized and affirmed the spirituality of everyday objects and interactions. The artist’s habitual and ritual acts of maintenance extended to domestic labor traditionally associated with “women’s work.” For Girouard each space, whether domestic or artistic, was a site of possibility for re-imagining how to expand ideas of collectivity across art worlds.

“I like art to function as a preserve, as a refuge,” wrote Girouard. By blurring the boundaries between her public contexts and private lives, she built and maintained such temporary refuges. In the structures that Girouard created, the elements were sacred and every organization of people, materials, and signs was more than the sum of its parts.

Following the premiere of Tina Girouard: Sign-in at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, LA, where the exhibition was researched and organized by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, Sign-in traveled to the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) in New York, NY, where Rivers and CARA collaboratively organized Girouard's first New York City retrospective. The debut of SIGN-IN at Museo Tamayo was born of this partnership between CARA and Rivers.