THE ARTIST TINA GIROUARD (1946–2020) ARRIVED IN NEW YORK CITY from the rice farms of southwestern Louisiana in 1969, when she moved into a Chatham Square apartment that would serve as home, studio, and artist crash pad. Over the next decade, she would become an essential figure in an experimental downtown milieu defined by an ethos of collaboration and a litany of place-names: 112 Greene Street, FOOD, Clocktower, Anarchitecture Group, The Kitchen, and Holly Solomon Gallery, among others. The performances, site-specific installations, and diaristic video art that Girouard produced throughout her life are richly documented in Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN, the catalogue accompanying Girouard’s brilliant recent retrospective. Edited by Andrea Andersson, who curated the exhibition with Jordan Amirkhani, the richly illustrated volume is rife with archival treasures, such as excerpts from Girouard’s diaries and her many “memory maps,” as well as photographs documenting performances in New York, New Orleans, and Europe that incorporated vertiginously patterned fabrics sourced from one of the many trips she made back to Louisiana, gathering scraps of material ranging from linoleum tiles to bolts of cloth. Given to Girouard from a Palestinian relative, The Solomon’s Lot fabrics, as they became known, were used for the final time in Girouard’s 1977 performance Pinwheel, her contribution to the group exhibition Five From Louisiana at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Inspired by the patterns of Tibetan thangka and Navajo sand painting, Girouard and her collaborators temporarily transformed the neoclassical building into a site for multicultural exchange. In an essay, the curator Lumi Tan, who restaged Pinwheel in 2019, smartly situates the documentation of Girouard’s performances as part of the artist’s desire to connect with broad audiences. This sense of foresight makes Girouard’s eclectic work a lively model for an approach that opens itself to influence while maintaining a commitment to the specificity of its source material. This important point is also articulated in curator Anaïs Duplan’s enlightening discussion of Girouard’s engagement with Haitian voodoo and the artistic collaborations she began with artists based in Port-au-Prince in the 1990s, a celebration of a broad Francophone legacy grounded in her own Cajun roots. Essays by Aruna D’Souza, Jordan Amirkhani, and Pamela M. Lee round out the volume, which includes an opening abecedarium detailing the important sites Girouard helped establish, and a poignant introduction by Andersson that positions Girouard’s “memory maps” as both sigil and guide. Readers of this invaluable text can use these maps, and the rich ephemera of Girouard’s life and practice, to do what the artist herself had done from the very beginning: find a way to keep going forward with a strong sense of where we’ve come from.