Southern Guild at at FOG Design+Art Fair

For Southern Guild’s debut participation at FOG Design+Art Fair, the gallery presents contemporary art and collectible design by principal artists from across Africa. The presentation will include a selection of photographic portraits from Zanele Muholi’s seminal series, Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail, the Dark Lioness), as well as a standout work in recycled metal by pioneering Malian designer Cheick Diallo. The gallery will also exhibit specially commissioned paintings by Mmangaliso Nzuza, Manyaku Mashilo and Ayotunde Ojo; ceramic and bronze sculpture by Zizipho Poswa; an abstract chemigram by Alex Hedison; hand-thrown ceramic seating by Chuma Maweni; a ceramic sculpture by Andile Dyalvane; and an organic bronze and glass table by designer Charles Haupt.

Southern Guild is the first and only gallery from the continent participating at FOG. Since opening a second location in Los Angeles in February 2024, it is also the only South African gallery to have a permanent space in the US. Southern Guild continues to further the continent’s contribution and inclusion in global arts movements.

South African visual activist Zanele Muholi presents seven photographic self-portraits from their defining series, Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail, the Dark Lioness). The ongoing project, first begun in 2012, now stands as an expanding archive, a statement of intimate Queer representation through the act of self-portraiture. The series sees Muholi as both fluid subject and vigorous image-maker. While one black-and-white portrait documents the artist in a quotidian moment of rest, other works present Muholi as a shifting vessel for different characters and archetypes. Impromptu and nomadic, the portraits employ objects beyond their primary functions: disposable cameras are strung together to form a garment; swimming goggles become a sartorial statement; a collective of wooden clothing pegs sit atop the artist’s head like a crown. This fractious utility echoes a broader disruption from within Muholi’s driving creative motivation. Somnyama Ngonyama is iconoclastic in its documentation of Muholi’s changing form, responding to the near invisibility of Black women and non-binary bodies as subjects of representation in the history of Western painting and portraiture prior to the 20th century.

Muholi will present a new solo exhibition at Southern Guild Los Angeles in May 2025, which will expand on the visual activist’s ongoing Faces and Phases photographic series, documenting new participants from Los Angeles, London and Sao Paolo. The new LA portraits were taken during Muholi’s two-month artist residency at the Hammer Museum in November 2024. Muholi will also have major solo exhibitions at the Instituto Moreira Salles (Sao Paulo, Brazil) and SCAD Museum of Art in Georgia, USA in February 2025. The artist’s recent extensive survey of photography and sculpture titled Zanele Muholi: Eye Me was exhibited in 2024 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Cheick Diallo M'be yan I (I'm Here), 2018 Recycled steel 31.9 x 25 x 44.9 in. | 81 x 63.5 x 114 cm Image courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild.

Seating by Malian designer, sculptor and architect Cheick Diallo has been crafted with salvaged steel. The minimal, angular body of the chair’s design is formed through a patchwork of recycled steel plates, refabricated and reinvigorated by the West African designer. Diallo is widely regarded as a pioneering presence on the African continent and has work in the collections of multiple institutions, including the Centre Pompidou, Vitra Design Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) and Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. In February 2025 Southern Guild Los Angeles will open a major solo retrospective titled Taama, Diallo’s first exhibition in the United States.

Manyaku Mashilo Being Black, 2023 Acrylic, ink, red ochre on canvas 98.4 x 59 in. | 250 x 150 cm Image courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild.

An arch-shaped mixed media painting from South African artist Manyaku Mashilo hangs portal-like, extending an aperture into the artist’s expansive, imagined world. Mashilo’s fluid figures come into being within this liminal, intersectional space, unencumbered by the weight of temporal containment or limitation. Mashilo’s luminously rendered canvases synthesise a range of art historical and cultural references, drawing from elements of her own upbringing, African myth, folklore, music and ritual. Mashilo’s forthcoming solo, The Laying of Hands, will open at Southern Los Angeles in February 2025. The artist will also participate in the gallery’s forthcoming debut presentation at Frieze LA.

An arch-shaped mixed media painting from South African artist Manyaku Mashilo hangs portal-like, extending an aperture into the artist’s expansive, imagined world. Mashilo’s fluid figures come into being within this liminal, intersectional space, unencumbered by the weight of temporal containment or limitation. Mashilo’s luminously rendered canvases synthesise a range of art historical and cultural references, drawing from elements of her own upbringing, African myth, folklore, music and ritual. Mashilo’s forthcoming solo, The Laying of Hands, will open at Southern Los Angeles in February 2025. The artist will also participate in the gallery’s forthcoming debut presentation at Frieze LA.

Mmangaliso Nzuza Good and Plenty, 2025 Oil on canvas 70.9 x 70.9 in. | 180 x 180 cm Image courtesy of Lea Crafford/Southern Guild.

Mmangaliso Nzuza’s large-scale figurative oil painting expands on the artist’s richly allegorical vernacular. Nzuza’s weighted subjects find ease in invented landscapes: bodies of water are sites of ritual cleansing; wheat fields connote the act of harvest, the ripening of time, care and the tender gesture of art-making itself. Nzuza’s figures exude a particular sculptural dignity, with the body being utilised as an instrument to explore possibilities of composition and angular form. Working textural fragments of impasto paint into patchwork planes of movement and light, Nzuza has developed a distinct hand with a growing collector audience. The artist's participation in FOG follows his 2024 debut solo exhibition An Open Letter at Southern Guild Cape Town.

Ayotunde Ojo Reclining man (Diptych), 2023 Oil, acrylic, charcoal on canvas 47.6 x 72.5 in. | 121 x 184 cm Image courtesy of Southern Guild.

Alongside Nzuza, Nigerian artist Ayotunde Ojo’s oil, acrylic and charcoal painting is a distilled vignette intimately documenting subjects within his home studio in Lagos. Building up his surfaces in a process of accumulative gesture and line, Ojo’s works create variable experiences of memory, light and perception. Depicting loved ones and friends as his chosen subjects, these figures quietly operate within the layered confines of the canvas, going about their day-to-day acts of life, domestic care, leisure and being. Ojo’s solo exhibition These Four Walls is currently on view at Southern Guild Cape Town until March 2025.

Zizipho Poswa Mam'uNoSayini, 2023 Bronze 41.4 x 41 x 14.1 in. | 105 x 104 x 36 cm Edition of 5, 2AP Image courtesy of Hayden Phipps/Southern Guild.

Two sculptural forms by ceramic artist Zizipho Poswa elevate the daily labours of South African women. Poswa’s hand-built, glazed ceramic work uNa’kaMzingisi (Mzingisi’s Mother) was first exhibited in the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation’s 2024 group exhibition, Ecospheres, alongside artists including Sutapa Biswas, Ximena Garrido-Lecca and Bronwyn Katz. The work abstracts the image of mother and child, conceptually rooted in the honouring of Poswa’s enduring matrilineal connection. Mam’uNoSayini is an all bronze work from the ceramist’s 2023 solo in New York, iiNtsika zeSizwe (Pillars of the Nation). Titled after a significant woman from Poswa’s home village of Holela in the rural South African province of the Eastern Cape, the work depicts a bundle of firewood atop a stippled patinated bronze body. The daily collection of firewood requires numerous hands, offering the opportunity for commune, exchange and connection amongst the village’s women.

Poswa’s practice is a bold enquiry into the origins of her own life, heritage and identity through the generative and ancient material of clay. Two totemic sculptures by Poswa, alongside a photographic work by Zanele Muholi, currently form part of Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st[1]Century Art and Poetics, a group exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) that finds aesthetic connections among 60 artists working in Africa, Europe and the Americas.

Further functional earthenware seating by South African master ceramist Chuma Maweni will also be exhibited. Maweni is currently exhibiting works alongside fellow Southern Guild artists Zanele Muholi and Zizipho Poswa in the Museum of the African Diaspora’s group exhibition Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors and Radical Black Joy, on view until 2 March, 2025. His debut solo exhibition iMvelaphi is currently on view at Southern Guild Cape Town until the end of January 2025

ABOUT SOUTHERN GUILD 

Established in 2008 by Trevyn and Julian McGowan, Southern Guild represents contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora. With a focus on Africa’s rich tradition of utilitarian and ritualistic art, the gallery’s programme furthers the continent’s contribution to global art movements. Southern Guild’s artists explore the preservation of culture, spirituality, identity, ancestral knowledge, and ecology within our current landscape. Their work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum, Mint Museum, Harn Museum, Denver Art Museum, Vitra Museum, Design Museum Gent and National Gallery of Victoria. Since 2018, the gallery has collaborated with BMW South Africa on a year-round programme of meaningful activations that promote artist development and propel their careers. Located in Cape Town, Southern Guild will expand internationally with a 5,000 sqft space opening in Melrose Hill, Los Angeles in February 2024. 

Southern Guild can be found at Booth 306 from 23-26 January 2025, Fort Mason Pier 2 and Pier 3, San Francisco.

For more information about this exhibit, please visit the Southern Guild website. For additional information about the FOG Design+Art fair please visit their site here. FOG Design+Art can be found on Instagram, and  Facebook.