Roméo Mivekannin: Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire)

NEW YORK — The show opened at Southern Guild New York on September 9, 2026, Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire) marks Roméo Mivekannin's first solo exhibition in New York and his first major presentation with the gallery. The exhibition traces two interconnected narratives through a new body of paintings on black velvet and an extensive portrait installation, examining how cultural memory is shaped through migration, representation, and acts of historical repair. The paintings pay tribute to the immigrant artists who helped define New York's creative landscape, while The Souls of Black Folk, an immersive installation inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois's landmark 1903 publication, is dedicated to the political leaders, intellectuals, and artists whose lives and legacies continue to inform Black history.

Taking its title from Saint-John Perse's Exile (1942), written during the French poet and Nobel laureate's years of exile in the United States, Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire) draws inspiration from the line, "We, bearers of fire, we, sowers of cities." For Mivekannin, these "bearers of fire" are the artists who arrived in New York from elsewhere: immigrants, refugees, and exiles whose creative labor transformed the city into one of the world's great cultural capitals.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Marking a significant evolution in his practice, the series extends Mivekannin's longstanding engagement with the European art historical canon to the immigrant artists and intellectuals whose contributions have profoundly influenced American cultural life. Having never visited New York himself, Mivekannin pays tribute not to the city as it exists, but to one encountered through their works. Conceived amid renewed debates around migration and belonging, Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire) affirms artistic creation as a force that defies borders.

“Each portrait tells the story of the journey: exile, loss, the human condition, but also the human genius to transcend reality through creation.”

— Roméo Mivekannin

The series pays tribute to artists who have profoundly influenced Mivekannin's own practice, including David Hammons, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Nicole Eisenman, Nona Faustine, James McNeill Whistler, and John Singer Sargent. Continuing his engagement with the Western canon, he reinterprets their works while inserting his own likeness into their compositions, exploring artistic inheritance and the ways histories are continually rewritten. Executed on black velvet, the paintings extend his investigation into portraiture as a site of historical revision.

Presented alongside this new body of work is The Souls of Black Folk, a monumental installation inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois's seminal 1903 book of the same name, a foundational text of the early Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States and a landmark in the global struggle for racial equality. The installation brings together portraits of Black politicians, writers, artists, musicians, and activists — including Josephine Baker, Malcolm X, Wole Soyinka, Édouard Glissant, Alicia Keys, and Kamala Harris — each paired with pages from Du Bois's publication. Suspended in a dense installation and occupying an entire room of the Tribeca gallery, the portraits form a constellation of voices whose lives span continents, generations, and political movements, charting more than a century of Black thought, creativity, and resistance.

Rather than presenting a singular historical narrative, Mivekannin brings together individuals whose contributions to racial justice took many different forms, transforming the gallery into a living archive where remembrance becomes an active, collective process. Across both bodies of work, Mivekannin examines the politics of representation. Drawing on photographic archives and canonical works of European painting, he interrogates the ways Black figures have been anonymized, eroticized, marginalized, or excluded within the Western artistic tradition. By repeatedly inserting his own portrait into these inherited images, he disrupts established narratives while reclaiming a space of visibility from which Black bodies have historically been excluded. His paintings become acts of both critique and repair.

Together, Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire) and The Souls of Black Folk reveal portraiture as more than a means of representation. For Mivekannin, it becomes an act of remembrance, resistance, and historical repair — one that reclaims overlooked lives while asking how cultural memory is continually shaped, revised, and carried forward.

ABOUT SOUTHERN GUILD

Southern Guild platforms artists whose work is ambitious, emotionally resonant, and rooted in personal and collective experience. Founded in 2008 by Trevyn and Julian McGowan and based in Cape Town and New York (opening 2026), the gallery is vested in artmaking as a means to claim agency, materialise cultural memory, and envision progressive futures. Working in the spirit of a guild, Southern Guild fosters collaborative, artist-led practices through rigorous engagement with material and process, comprehensive programming, and the GUILD Residency in Cape Town. Recognised for its bold curatorial vision and commitment to material integrity, the gallery presents at leading international fairs and partners with curators, institutions, and museums to deepen the impact and visibility of its artists. Works have been acquired by institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Brooklyn Museum, Hammer Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) Gallery artists have also exhibited at Tate Modern, Pompidou Centre, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Saint- Étienne Métropole (MAMC), Seoul Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, and Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, among others

Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire) will close on October 29, 2026. For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Southern Guild Website here; the gallery can also be found on Artsy, Instagram, and Facebook. The magazine also did an interview with the artist which can be found here.

Roméo Mivekannin: Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire)

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