GOING FOR GUILD
One of SA’s most pioneering contemporary art and design galleries, Southern Guild, now has a space in Tinseltown, writes Andrea Nagel
Sprawling and strewn with skyscrapers, Los Angeles, even more than New York, is where people from all over the world go to make it big, beckoned by the neon lights of Sunset Boulevard, to bask under the palms that line Santa Monica beach, or get a glimpse of the world’s most glamorous people on the Dolby Theatre red carpet. But, clichés aside, Los Angeles is an exciting place to be — not least because it’s the home of Hollywood and the stars. It’s also a city of culture, food, iconic architecture, amazing natural beauty and vibrant people.
Now there’s a new energy in town, and it emanates from South Africa in a sphere that’s less obvious than the entertainment scene. “We were drawn to Los Angeles because its palpable vibrancy is similar to that of Cape Town. It’s perfectly suited to our particular brand of innovative art space,” says Trevyn McGowan, co-founder of one of South Africa’s most pioneering contemporary art and design galleries.
“Our gallery model is a disruptive and progressive one, focusing on cultural preservation in all its forms, which in addition to rich craft traditions includes spirituality, ancestral knowledge and ecology.”
Trevyn and her partner Julian McGowan have been huge players on the South African art scene for decades and are well known by collectors, artists, curators, art scholars and fair organisers around the world. They founded Southern Guild in Cape Town in 2008 to represent contemporary artist practices from the African continent and diaspora, and have launched the careers of some globally significant artists, including Zizipho Poswa, who is their first solo artist at the new LA gallery.
Located on Western Avenue in a historic 1920s building in Melrose Hill, their new 464m gallery is designed by Evan Raabe Architecture Studio, a Los Angeles-based firm known for designing the Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles flagship and Christie’s Beverly Hills, among many other projects.
Adjoining a courtyard and restaurant, the gallery’s position makes it a destination for art lovers to get a bite and relax while enjoying the work exhibited in three largescale spaces, with meeting and viewing rooms. “There’s an amazing new café there called Café Telegrama and a restaurant called Etra, which are the new ‘cool kids’ on the block,” says Trevyn. “Everyone eats on the sidewalks. We’ve come into a community that’s ready-made. It feels like a zeitgeist moment.”
They launched the space on February 22 with a private viewing, and on February 24 with a larger viewing to much fanfare and excitement. “Julian and I make big decisions very quickly and we act on them immediately,” says Trevyn, whose track record proves this modus operandi to be a highly successful strategy.
“We decided while showing a few of our artists at Untitled Art Fair in Miami in 2023 that we should have a space in LA. I’ve had those feelings about five times in my life —
and acted on them — and they’ve totally changed the course of things.
“I thought, we should open an international space, the time is now, we are ready and it has to be LA.”
In between Design Week Miami and Miami Art Basel parties, she spent the rest of the trip glued to Google Maps to find the perfect position for the LA gallery and set their plan into action as soon as they returned home to Cape Town. “The location we eventually chose used to be a prop store in the ’40s,” says Trevyn. “It was repurposed into a furniture shop and then it became a laundry. When we found it, it was called LaundryWood — where all the stars aired their dirty washing.”
The site was full of washing machines and pillars, which they removed to make the gallery space. “The buildings in LA are put together simply. They’re like sets, they’re full of creativity, and when you look up, the Hollywood sign is directly over the building.”
The positioning of the gallery will be vital to its success. “It’s in East Hollywood,” adds Trevyn. “West Hollywood is the more fashionable trendy part, but this side is starting to take off. It’s next to Silver Lakes and Los Feliz, where a lot of young creators are based. Walt Disney’s first house was there, and there’s a cool, young art crowd in the area. It’s close to downtown LA, which has a great arts community and we’re just beneath the Hollywood Hills and Beachwood Canyon, so we’re very well positioned.”
But, many in the art world would say, the American art centres are traditionally New York and Miami. Why would Southern Guild choose LA?
It was a personal choice for Trevyn, Julian and their team. “I was swayed by the romanticism of the music industry in the 60s and ’70s , and the film industry — which is where I started my career — I always wanted to make it in Hollywood,” she adds.
“The city is incredibly familiar and the people are like Joburg people. There’ sa welcoming energy and an outdoors lifestyle — and the weather is great. I felt at home there and that I could navigate easily. There’s also a lot of space which we need as many of our paintings and sculptures are large.”
The gallery opened with two inaugural exhibitions. Mother Tongues, which celebrates standout artists from the gallery’s roster, and a solo exhibition of monumental ceramic sculpture by Poswa, Indyebo yakwaNtu (Black Bounty).
Highlighting the socially embedded role of African art through history and the marriage of personal narrative with Africa’s current geopolitical, economic, cultural and ecological context, Mother Tongues features artists including Zanele Muholi, Andile Dyalvane, Porky Hefer, Manyaku Mashilo, Madoda Fani, Kamyar Bineshtarigh and Oluseye.
Accompanying this group exhibition, Poswa’s solo exhibition features her most ambitious body of work to date. Last year, ahead of Southern Guild’s expansion, the gallery participated in The Armory Show in New York, where Poswa presented a work from her Umthwalo series (meaning “load”), which pays tribute to Southern Africa’s rural women and the heavy burdens they balance on their heads, often walking long distances on foot. They were shown at Armory Off-Site at the US Open.
For the opening of the LA gallery, Poswa created five colossal ceramic and bronze sculptures of over 2.4m tall. The clay bodies were produced during her summer-long residency at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics (CCC) at California State University Long Beach, where Poswa had access to the centre’s immense kilns.
She worked under the guidance and apprenticeship of renowned American ceramic artist Tony Marsh, co-founder and inaugural director of the CCC, which functions as an influential hub for expanded discourse and advanced creative production in the West Coast ceramics community.
Translated from Xhosa, indyebo literally refers to material riches but more broadly encompasses the cultural, economic, intellectual and spiritual wealth of Africans. Ntu is the spirit that defines and gives impetus an embodiment of the identity, consciousness and life purposes of African people.
“Drawing on Africa’s own mineral wealth, her people have created an immeasurable creative collection from which African men and women adorn themselves, resulting in a language of objects that has come to shape our identity,” says Poswa.
This series of sculptures, with their bronze crowns, is a praise song to early African civilisations. The artist traces the traditional healing customs, polytheistic practices and cosmological knowledge of her amaXhosa culture to its Kemetic heritage.
The influence of the Nubian kingdom — rich in gold, ivory and ebony — spread along the Nile from Eqypt to Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia and through trade routes, human migration and nomadic cultures to the Swahili civilisation in Mozambique, the Sahara of Northern Africa, and the Southern African region, Poswa’s home. She says: “Indyebo yakwaNtu is an anthropological excavation that weaves together the sociocultural and spiritual elements that underpin African creation.”
Says Trevyn: “LA is the right place for these works. The pieces pay tribute to the idea of travel, migration, integration and sharing of cultures.”
Mother Tongues is a huge show of 25 artists. “We opened it with a sound healing performance led by Andile Dyalvane, one of Southern Guild’s leading artists.
“It’s a bit like meditation,” says Trevyn. “Everyone switches their phones off and gets into the moment, a bit like yoga. We’ve been doing it in our Cape Town gallery for years and we thought it would be the most authentic way to gift our LA audience with an understanding of who we are and an immediate insight into how the gallery experience can be different.”
Zizipho Poswa: Indyebo yakwaNtu (Black Bounty) and Mother Tongues are both on until April 27 2024. Southern Guild LA is located at 747 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90029.