In Tribeca, NYC: Roméo Mivekannin's First New York Solo Show Closes Oct. 29 at Southern Guild

Southern Guild's Tribeca space at 75 Leonard St is showing Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire), the first New York solo exhibition by Roméo Mivekannin. It opened September 9 and closes October 29.

The core of the show is a new group of acrylic paintings on black velvet. Mivekannin takes well-known images and places his own likeness inside them. In Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream, the storm gives way to a night sky and the figure rests unafraid beneath the stars. Against Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, he sets what he calls "the other crossing," one without a flag or a hero. Lunch atop a Skyscraper becomes a picture of the unseen labor that built the city, and a work after Basquiat and Warhol is among the others. The velvet absorbs color and light, so the bodies seem to hover between presence and disappearance.

Alongside the paintings hangs The Souls of Black Folk, a portrait installation inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois's 1903 book. Its portraits include Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Billie Holiday, Spike Lee and Lupita Nyong'o, each paired with layered excerpts from Du Bois's text.

The title comes from a line in Saint-John Perse's poem Exile: "We, bearers of fire, we, sowers of cities." The show coincides with Mivekannin's first visit to New York, a city he had known only through other artists' work.