On Friday, 25 September, Southern Guild New York joins more than 80 downtown galleries and art spaces for After Hours: Downtown Gallery Night, an evening of extended opening hours coinciding with Armory Week.

Between 6–8PM, visitors to Southern Guild at 75 Leonard Street, Tribeca, will have an extended opportunity to experience Roméo Mivekannin’s Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire), his first solo exhibition in New York, as well as his first with the gallery. The exhibition expands on Mivekannin’s ongoing engagement with art history, portraiture and the archive, revisiting images in which Black subjects have historically been absent, marginalised or subjected to an external gaze.

Across new paintings on black velvet, Mivekannin inserts his own likeness into compositions drawn from art history and visual culture, shifting their perspective and questioning how histories are constructed, remembered and transmitted. These works are presented alongside The Souls of Black Folk, an expansive portrait installation honouring artists, writers and thinkers whose lives and work have shaped cultural histories across borders.

After Hours offers a chance to explore exhibitions across Tribeca and the wider downtown art district in a single evening. The Showrunner app provides the full list of participating spaces, details of what is on view, maps and directions to help visitors plan their route.

The evening continues with drinks at YveYANG until 9PM, sponsored by Showrunner.