Southern Guild at The Armory Show 2025 anchors African voices in global modern art

Southern Guild returns to The Armory Show at New York's Javits Center from September 5 – 7, 2025, with a presentation affirming its role as one of the leading platforms for African and diasporic artists. This marks the art gallery's third consecutive year at the art fair and the showcase, featuring painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics and mixed-media, underscores Southern Guild's commitment to amplifying diverse practices rooted in identity, history and form.

Their booth brings together seminal works by Zanele Muholi, Zizipho Poswa, Manyaku Mashilo, Madoda Fani, Mmangaliso Nzuza, Terence Maluleke, Roméo Mivekannin, Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Amine El Gotaibi, Usha Seejarim and Ayotunde Ojo. Representing voices from South Africa, Morocco, Nigeria, Benin and the broader African diaspora, the art exhibition demonstrates Southern Guild's evolving curatorial vision following the opening of its Los Angeles outpost in 2024.

Among the highlights are two illuminated lightbox photographs by Muholi from their iconic Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness) series. Taken in transient spaces such as hotel rooms, the self-portraits transform the artist into shifting archetypes, confronting the historical invisibility of Black women and non-binary subjects in Western art history. Muholi's work, celebrated in major museum exhibitions across Porto, São Paulo and Savannah this year, continues to build transnational Queer kinship through photographic activism.

Poswa's ceramic and bronze sculpture art, part of her Magodi series, pays homage to African hairstyling traditions, situating hair as both cultural archive and aesthetic lineage. Continuing the theme of cultural transmission, Mashilo presents monumental red-hued paintings inspired by the matrilineal rituals of her Sepedi heritage. Using red ochre (letsoku) as both reference and metaphor, her figures embody intergenerational guidance and knowledge. Her practice, recently seen at the Stellenbosch Triennial and in her U.S. solo debut, The Laying of Hands in Los Angeles, extends into an inquiry into indigenous architecture and spatial belonging.

Fani's smoke-fired ceramic vessels, drawn from his new series Inzonzobila (The Deep), embody a fusion of tradition and experimentation. Schooled in Nguni ceramic art practices, Fani burnishes and polishes his unglazed surfaces before smoke-firing them in a drum, producing lustrous black finishes. His pieces are already held in major museum collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Mint Museum.

Other notable contributions include Nzuza's large-scale oil paintings, which reimagine figuration through angular forms and sculptural textures; Maluleke's urban-inspired portrait of rapper Pusha T at the Met Gala, blending comic and painterly techniques to explore Black dandyism; and Mivekannin's velvet paintings, which insert his own image into Western portraiture to interrogate Eurocentric art histories.

The exhibition also features Bineshtarigh's abstract wall extractions, preserving memory through layers of architectural residue and El Gotaibi's sculptural wall hanging of iron and wool, exploring the tension between nature and society within African identity.

Together, these works present a rich dialogue across media and geographies, united by an urgent exploration of identity, cultural memory and belonging. At The Armory Show 2025, Southern Guild not only foregrounds individual artistic voices but also asserts the place of African contemporary art within global conversations.