Irene Georgia Tsatsos (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker whose practice centers care, memory, and presence. Working across textiles, drawing, writing, and spatial engagement, Tsatsos explores how art can hold the unseen and tend to the relational.
Informed by the Latin “curare” – to care for – her artistic and curatorial work acts as a form of stewardship: attentive, embodied, and responsive. Across three decades, she has cultivated a deeply situated practice shaped by daily ritual, collective inquiry, and a commitment to creating spaces that remember, reclaim, and repair. Currently, Tsatsos is exploring the culture, ethics, and structures of care; how caring impulses can and often are instrumentalized; how care is offered and experienced; and what care can be in a variety of relational contexts.
Tsatsos was chief curator at Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA, was the director of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and has held positions at the Whitney and the Getty. She has taught writing and curatorial practice at University of California Los Angeles, Claremont Graduate University, University of Southern California, CalArts, and My Friends Place, a social service agency that assists unhoused and marginalized youth. Tsatsos is a trustee at Feminist Center for Creative Work.
As a child I was introduced to stitching in multiple forms (embroidery, darning, machine sewing) by my mother and aunt, along with my grandmother, who (along with the rest of my grandparents) immigrated to the US from rural mainland Greece and who lived through the austerity and upheaval of that experience along with the depression and WWII. With an upbringing that emphasized a "waste not, want not" ethos, mending, repair, and recycling have been in my life as long as I can recall. ("Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" was a favorite reminder of my thrifty New England aunt.) Mending was a matter of course; it took many forms and used many materials. I recall as a school-age child taping up the dust cover of a beloved book, basically wrapping the entire sheet in tape to fill in parts of the paper that were missing. This was around the same time I began darning my socks, which is hard to believe in this era of disposable clothing. This was also around the time my mother became an early adopter of the practice of recycling. Each week she tied up bundles of newspaper and soaked the labels off cans before crushing them and hauled it all to the recycling center four miles away.In high school I became attached to my father's WWII military-issued sweater, patching the elbows and mending the many holes in this moth-eaten garment, which I wore somewhat defiantly to school. By the time I was in art school, I was collecting furniture from the street and repairing and repainting it, applying strategies learned from my father, himself a repairer. (He was an orthopedic surgeon and a hobbyist woodworker and horologist.) As such, mending and repair were never really a practice, certainly never theorized, but instead part of a set of inherent familial and cultural values based on frugality, a disdain for wastefulness, admiration for fine craftwork, and basic environmental conscientiousness. However, a collateral benefit, or perhaps an adjacent value nurtured through the act of mending and repair, is an attachment to my own labor, the work of my hands, as well as an attachment to my family history and ancestors. Mending is therefore a somatic experience that connects to the healing of my own soul wounds, including those engendered by capital's extractive demands on my time. It is a form of resistance, economically, ideologically, and spiritually.
Dream video — Blanket
Self-portrait, 1986, Pastel on paper, 12” x 9”
Dia de los Muertos, 2020, Photograph, Photograph by T Antonakis Ruben Kane
CV
Journals
Memoir In Boxes
Serpent Mound, 2021 — Video documentation of a walk to a Bodewadmiakiwen (Potawatomi)/serpent mound in Thatcher Woods, River Forest, IL. Through a confluence of accidents, the discovery of scant historical records, vivid recurring and documented nighttime dreams over 25+ years, and pressing curiosity, I located a Bodewadmiakiwen (Potawatomi)/Neshnabe serpent mound in the Cook County (IL) Forest Preserves, one block from where I grew up outside of Chicago. The forest was visible from my childhood bedroom window. The mound itself was close, the equivalent of only 3-4 blocks, but not directly visible through all those forest-preserve trees.
In March 2019, thanks to the research of Laurel McMahon, River Forest (IL) Historic Preservation Commissioner, I learned that the site was topo-mapped in 1938 by Isabel Bassett Wasson, one of the first female petroleum geologists in the US, the first female ranger at Yellowstone Park, and one of the first interpretive rangers hired by the National Park Service. The mound was verified at that time by Dr. Fay Cooper Cole, head of the anthropology department at University of Chicago, as an “Indian effigy mound.” Dr. Cole’s plans to have students study it further were derailed by WWII. Isabel Wasson re-located and re-identified the mound in 1969, and in 1973 reported her findings to Cook County’s Department of Conservation (but not before the serpent’s tail was crushed by a county truck removing blighted elms). The site remains unmarked, at least by the graphic protocols of Cook County Forest Preserve; unknown to staff at the adjacent (and beloved) nature center; and appears to be almost completely overgrown. I wouldn’t have found it without Wasson’s detailed notes from 47 years ago, which I found by accident. Question now, is what to do with this info? With these observations?
Self-portrait, 1988
Self-portrait, 1987
Nana bowl
Τα παπούτσια του Πάπου / Papou’s Shoes, c. 1985, Pine Point, Maine, photograph by Nick Netos — From the photographer: So, so personal. I remember thinking how much they said of who he was; the hard work ethic, the frugality, the selflessness. It was taken to reflect profound meaning of a man and his work.
Red Plank