The 4,000-square-foot space, with 17-foot-high pressed tin ceilings and an 1886 Italianate façade, includes two exhibition galleries, a viewing room, and offices, and is housed within a building originally developed for the dry goods trade. The move to New York follows a significant chapter in Los Angeles, where Southern Guild opened its first U.S. gallery in 2024 and cultivated an engaged following of artists, collectors, and institutions on the West Coast.

Nzuza and Seejarim’s inaugural exhibitions affirm Southern Guild’s commitment to advancing practices rooted in material experimentation, identity, and authentic cultural perspective, establishing New York as a new home for the gallery’s ambitious program.

“New York feels like it’s been a long time coming, and Usha and Mmangaliso are exactly who we want to arrive with. Their practices embody everything Southern Guild stands for,” shares Trevyn McGowan, who co-founded the gallery with her husband, Julian, in 2008. “The past few years have pushed us to think expansively, and New York gives us the stage to bring that vision to life. After multiple presentations at fairs like The Armory Show and Frieze New York, and successful collaborations with partner galleries here since 2013, we’re thrilled to establish a lasting presence in Tribeca. The city’s pace, ambition, and radical imagination mirror the energy of the work we represent.”

Ballad of the Peacock is eagerly anticipated and confirms Mmangaliso Nzuza as a rising talent in contemporary figurative oil painting. Working from his studio in Woodstock, Cape Town, Nzuza constructs psychologically charged scenes populated by a cast of recurring subjects. Declarative in their dimensional form and self-possession, the figures’ assertive presence subtly destabilizes the viewer’s gaze. These characters appear at once archetypal and intimate, occupying the pictorial space with quiet authority. Patterned garments drawn from fashion magazines operate as expressive second skins, transforming clothing into a language of performance, self-adornment, and personal mythology.

Used extends Usha Seejarim’s three-decade-long practice by foregrounding the material and emotional traces left by continual use. Bringing together new wall-based and sculptural works composed of repurposed irons, wooden clothespins, and other household objects, the exhibition explores how repetition, pressure, and care become inscribed in everyday materials over time. Inspired in part by on Sara Ahmed’s reflections on “use” as bodily, effortful, and repetitive, Seejarim reframes household objects as sites where labor, intimacy, and social expectation accumulate, transforming acts of maintenance and endurance into gestures of quiet resistance.

Southern Guild represents more than 30 international artists whose practices combine conceptual rigor, material experimentation, and cultural perspective. The gallery’s New York opening marks an organic point of progression – an expansion of the gallery’s program onto a wider stage while remaining grounded in the artist-driven way of working that defines its united community.