Southern Guild expands its New York presence across the Armory Week

Southern Guild returns to The Armory Show with an expansive showcase in Javits Center, New York, on view from September 24 – 27, 2026. The gallery’s Booth 210 brings together 20 artists across generations, geographies and disciplines, while Sandra Brewster is featured in the fair’s Platform section. Across the Armory Week, the art gallery is also presenting South African artist Nano Le Face in a solo exhibition at the U-Haul Art Fair in Chelsea.

“Since opening on Leonard Street in April, Southern Guild’s New York program has unfolded through a series of focused solo exhibitions, introducing singular artistic practices in depth. This edition of The Armory Show marks a different kind of arrival: a moment for these practices to be encountered in dialogue, revealing the breadth of material, conceptual and cultural positions that have shaped the gallery over nearly two decades,” Southern Guild notes in an official release.

The art exhibition at The Armory Show brings practices into dialogue rather than presenting them in isolation. “Moving between figuration and abstraction, monumentality and intimate mark-making, the presentation traces the different ways artists locate human experience in body and material,” the gallery notes. Among the contemporary artists presented is Zanele Muholi, whose photographic self-portraiture and bronze sculpture continue an investigation into Blackness, queer visibility, representation and the politics of looking. Nandipha Mntambo draws on the history of the Agoodjie, the all-female army of the Kingdom of Dahomey, using her own body to engage with histories that have been erased. Roméo Mivekannin similarly turns to portraiture and cultural memory, inserting his own likeness into Andy Warhol’s well-known portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“Elsewhere, material becomes a means of registering memory and experience,” the contemporary art gallery explains. Usha Seejarim works with reclaimed iron sole plates associated with repetitive domestic labour, while Oluseye incorporates objects gathered during his trans-Atlantic travels, or what he calls ‘diasporic debris’, to consider migration. Wura-Natasha Ogunji works with thread, ink and graphite to explore movement and women’s bodies in public space. Zizipho Poswa transforms clay into vessels rooted in Xhosa ceremonial traditions, while Bonolo Kavula deconstructs Shweshwe fabric into intricate geometric compositions informed by Southern Africa’s colonial history. Amine El Gotaibi contrasts Corten steel with sheep’s wool in an exploration of territory, craft and North African landscapes. Kamyar Bineshtarigh’s monumental Intifada painting extends his engagement with language, mark-making and political resistance.

Other artists on view include Chloe Chiasson, Jozua Gerrard, Justine Mahoney, Napoles Marty, Mmangaliso Nzuza, Ayotunde Ojo, Stanislaw Trzebinski, and Dominique Zinkpè, alongside Adebayo Bolaji and Thando Phenyane. “Across these practices, medium is not a passive carrier of meaning but an active participant in its construction: cut, transferred, punctured, cast, reclaimed, layered and reworked to make histories physically present,” the gallery notes.

At the U-Haul Art Fair, also taking place September 25 – 27, 2026, Southern Guild presents Le Face’s If You’re Not Having Fun, You’re Not Doing It Right. Installed in and around a rented moving truck, the showcase places framed drawings inside the vehicle alongside unframed works and hand-altered clothing outside it. “Fashion imagery, film, cartoons, celebrity culture, advertising, song lyrics and internet detritus collide across Le Face’s work. His recurring cast of stylised female figures inhabits a world of heightened aspiration and self-consciousness, where glamour, beauty, hedonistic pleasure and success coexist uneasily with insecurity, loneliness and existential doubt,” Southern Guild explains.

Brewester’s Make Trouble (2024), on the other hand, is an ongoing exploration of identity, personal history and diasporic belonging. “Inspired by Fred Moten’s lecture Black Optimism / Black Operation and the Child Development Group of Mississippi’s freedom song ‘Da da da da,’ Make Trouble constructs an archival narrative in which childhood becomes a site of possibility,” the gallery explains.