Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought

Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (Rivers) is a New Orleans-based non-profit organization for research, publishing, and exhibitions of contemporary art. Rivers recognizes art as forms of thought shaped by geographic, social, political, environmental, and economic histories and commits to art informed by diasporic experience. Alert to the challenges of our world, Rivers proposes alternative models for art and cultural production that is dependent on long-form collaboration with a global network of committed partners and institutions, together with whom we nurture projects from early research through public presentation.

Research

Research Support for the Development and Production of a Posthumous Retrospective Exhibition of Louisiana Artist Tina Girouard (1946-2020) Organized by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought

Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought is proud to organize Tina Girouard: Sign-In, the posthumous retrospective of the artist and Louisiana-native Tina Girouard (b. DeQuincey, LA 1946; d. Cecilia, LA 2020). Crossing time and sociogeographies (Louisiana, New York, Haiti), Sign-in traces the artist's formal lexicon, first articulated in the 1960s, and its application, sequencing, and recapitulation across time, mediums, and cultural traditions.

A vanguard artist in the fields of film, performance, prints, textile, painting, and community-based practice, Girouard's works figure in iterable and indissociable arrangements that transcend mediums and movements. They are fundamentally animated by and made meaningful through the social environments and experiments, which engendered them. A co-founder of the Anarchitecture Group, 112 Greene Street, FOOD restaurant, the Festival de la Louisiane, and a collaborator in artist communities in Lafayette, New York, and Port-au-Prince, Girouard established form as a demonstration of relationship and participation as precondition for significance.