Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN: Book Launch and Conversation with Rivers Institute and Dancing Foxes Press

Join us on Wednesday, October 1 at 7pm to celebrate the New York launch of Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN (Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and Dancing Foxes Press, 2025)—the first monograph of the Louisiana-born artist Tina Girouard (1945–2020). Featuring unpublished texts and images from Girouard’s personal archives and newly commissioned essays from Andrea Andersson, Jordan Amirkhani, Aruna D’Souza, Anaïs Duplan, Pamela M. Lee, and Lumi Tan, Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN emphasizes her movements between genres and geographies, and the ways in which she invested objecthood with meaning through ritual, performance, role-playing, and community participation from the 1970s until her death.

A galvanizing member of artist-led communities and organizations, including the Anarchitecture Group, the interdisciplinary cohort of 112 Greene Street, FOOD restaurant, The Kitchen, P.S. 1, and the Festival International de Louisiane, Girouard’s 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.

Andrea Andersson (Founding Director & Chief Curator, Rivers) will be in conversation with publishers Barbara Schroeder and Karen Kelly (Dancing Foxes Press), Jordan Amirkhani, and Lumi Tan to discuss the spirit of collaboration and collage at work in this publication, and the ways in which access to Girouard’s archives shaped the tone and sentiment. Short readings from the book will follow.

Rivers Institute of Contemporary Art & Thought (Rivers) is a cultural nonprofit for artists of the global diaspora. Based in New Orleans, a city whose history and future are predicated upon and consigned to displacement, Rivers commits to migrational imaginations. Their program is built with sensitivity to forms that evolve from past, present and future experiences of dislocation, translation, longing, and reconstitution, among other tools and conditions of diasporic living.

Dancing Foxes Press is a Brooklyn-based independent publishing platform founded in 2012 by Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder. Projects are driven by content and collaboration. Dancing Foxes Press values process, active and critical dialogues, and focuses on the singularity of each project. Dancing Foxes Press is recognized for distinctive publications that are commissioned for their specificity and realized through editorial collaboration and hands-on production and craftsmanship. All aspects of the production process are considered part of the content, so that the form of the book ultimately carries the project’s message. A broad objective of the Press is to recognize social responsibility in publishing and present and affirm a range of cultural experiences and artistic practices.