The Armory Show 2026

For its first Armory Show since establishing a permanent New York space, Southern Guild will show its most comprehensive fair presentation in the city to date. Spanning 21 artists across generations, geographies, and disciplines, Booth 210 offers an expansive view of the gallery’s current and forthcoming programme, alongside a presentation of Sandra Brewster’s immense photographic installation in the fair’s dedicated Platform section. The gallery’s presence across Armory Week will also include a solo presentation by South African artist Nano Le Face at the U-Haul Art Fair from September 25–27 in Chelsea, New York.

Since opening on Leonard Street in April this year, Southern Guild’s New York programme 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.

Booth 210 features Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Sandra Brewster, Chloe Chiasson, Amine El Gotaibi, Jozua Gerrard, Bonolo Kavula, Justine Mahoney, Roméo Mivekannin, Nandipha Mntambo, Zanele Muholi, Mmangaliso Nzuza, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Ayotunde Ojo, Oluseye, Zizipho Poswa, Usha Seejarim, Stanislaw Trzebinski, and Dominique Zinkpè, as well as Adebayo Bolaji, Thania Petersen and Thando Phenyane, all being shown by the gallery for the first time.

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 body is variously pictured — fragmented, implied, or absent — while materials become repositories of experience, carrying associations with labour, domestic life, migration, place, displacement, and inherited forms of knowledge.

Several works foreground the body as a vehicle for agency and historical revision. Zanele Muholi’s photographic self-portrait and bronze sculpture extend the visual activist’s ongoing investigation of representation, Blackness, Queer visibility, and the politics of looking. Nandipha Mntambo draws on the legacy of the Agoodjie, the all-female army of the Kingdom of Dahomey, using her own body to reanimate a history that has been both erased and mythologised over time. Roméo Mivekannin inserts his own likeness into a well-known portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat by Andy Warhol, continuing his interrogation of portraiture, authorship, and cultural memory in Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire), opening at Southern Guild New York on September 9, and on view until October 24.

Elsewhere, material becomes a means of registering memory and experience. Usha Seejarim transforms reclaimed iron sole plates associated with repetitive domestic labour into sculptural accumulations, an ongoing inquiry recently recognised through an acquisition by the North Dakota Museum of Art. Oluseye reanimates found objects collected during his trans-Atlantic travels – which he terms “diasporic debris” – to trace the migrations and manifestations of Blackness, while Wura-Natasha Ogunji uses thread, ink, and graphite on tracing paper to explore movement, physicality, and women’s bodies in public space.

Thania Petersen approaches the ocean as a repository of diasporic memory and ancestral movement across the Afrasiatic Sea. Zizipho Poswa transforms clay into vessels of matrilineal knowledge rooted in Xhosa ceremonial traditions, while Bonolo Kavula deconstructs culturally charged Shweshwe fabric into intricate geometric compositions comprised of tiny discs of fabric, informed by family memory and Southern Africa’s colonial history.

Material transformation also animates Amine El Gotaibi’s wall-based installation, which places Corten steel in visceral and tactile contrast with sheep’s wool as part of the Moroccan artist’s wider exploration of territory, craft, and the landscapes of North Africa. Kamyar Bineshtarigh’s monumental Intifada painting (measuring more than 9 feet wide) extends his ongoing engagement with language, mark-making, and political resistance. 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.

SANDRA BREWSTER — PLATFORM

Alongside Booth 210, Southern Guild presents Sandra Brewster’s Make Trouble (2024) as part of The Armory Show’s Platform section. Originally commissioned for the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art, the installation draws on Brewster’s ongoing exploration of identity, personal history, and diasporic belonging.

Working with personal childhood photographs, Brewster employs her signature gel-transfer technique to enlarge and transfer images onto timber panels. Abrasions, gaps, and traces left by the process register the image’s migration from one surface to another, transforming the act of transfer into a metaphor for movement, displacement, and the persistence of recollection.

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. Personal history intersects with broader histories of Black displacement and resilience, while the child emerges as a figure capable of imagining otherwise — of troubling inherited structures and opening space for different futures. Brewster’s presentation sharpens a defining thread running through Southern Guild’s wider presentation at the fair: the body as both an archive and an agent of transformation.

NANO LE FACE — U-HAUL ART FAIR

At the second edition of U-Haul Art Fair, Southern Guild presents If You’re Not Having Fun, You’re Not Doing It Right, a solo project by South African artist Nano Le Face. Installed in and around a rented moving truck, framed drawings occupy the interior while unframed works and one-of-a-kind, hand-altered clothing extend outside, embracing the fair’s unconventional, street-level format and Le Face’s instinctive approach to art-making beyond the gallery frame.

A self-taught artist who studied Film Arts before turning to fine art, Le Face works primarily in pencil, crayon, and marker, drawing compulsively from the world around him. His distinctive visual language took shape in 2020, when he ran out of painting materials and began working with whatever he could find. This resourcefulness remains fundamental to a practice in which found paper, discarded drawings, handwritten text, mistakes, and revisions are continually absorbed back into the work.

Fashion imagery, film, cartoons, celebrity culture, advertising, song lyrics, overheard conversations, and internet detritus collide across his work. A recurring cast of archetypal female figures moves between glamour and insecurity, humor and depression, while fragments of text operate simultaneously as dialogue, internal monologue, punchline, and narration. Familiar brands and consumer symbols are sampled, distorted, and recombined. These motifs migrate from paper onto clothing, transforming garments through cutting, stitching, patching, drawing, and painting into singular works of wearable art.