Southern Guild LA presents Manyaku Mashilo’s ‘The Laying of Hands’ and Cheick Diallo’s ‘Taama’ this February.
Contemporary South African artist Manyaku Mashilo’s first solo exhibition in the United States features a new series of multi-panel paintings exploring her own transition into womanhood. Southern Guild presents ‘The Laying of Hands’ by Manyaku Mashilo at its gallery in Melrose Hill, Los Angeles, opening on the 13th of February 2025 and running until the 3rd of May 2025. This deeply resonant body of work reflects on Mashilo’s own experience of coming into womanhood while also addressing themes of African spirituality, memory, community and belonging.
Using an abstracted language of figuration, Mashilo’s mixed-media paintings and sculptural installations pay powerful homage to the indigenous knowledge systems with which she was brought up. Objects and materials imbued with sacred and ritualistic significance feature prominently as motifs, including wooden walking sticks or staffs, mounds of soil, herbs and oils, a traditional hut, and the Ntepa skirt, a garment made from beadwork and animal skin worn by Pedi girls as a symbol of womanhood. The spiritual presence of the artist’s grandmother presides over this body of work, in tribute to her teachings and influence in preserving cultural rituals and practices that are central to the upbringing of children and the journey from girlhood to maturity.
Born in Limpopo province in 1991, Mashilo’s multidimensional practice encompasses mixed-media painting, drawing, collage, film and installation. Her paintings build expansive scenes where imagined representatives of Blackness migrate through abstract liminal spaces. These scenes act as celestial cartographies, connecting the depicted Black figures through a felt mutuality of heritage, spirituality, shared ritual and intent. These migratory figures, forever moving between and through, are driven by an energetic pull toward a new vanguard where purpose and representation can be renegotiated.
Mashilo’s figures are drawn from family photographs and portraits of people from her own community, all historical imagery depicting various experiences of Black lives. In this way, lieage and memory, both collective and personalised, conflate in this unknown world. Her vast cosmological landscapes offer a multiverse of imagined futures, weaving together place and space, charting a rich and diverse tradition of African spirituality and identity.
Mashilo’s 2023 exhibition at Southern Guild Cape Town, ‘An Order of Being’, followed solos at 99 Loop Gallery in Cape Town and the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, both in 2020. Her work has been featured in Spectrum: On Color and Contemporary Art at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, Africa Supernova at Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort, The Netherlands and Rites of Passage at Gagosian, London. Mashilo has also participated in exhibitions at the African Artists Foundation in Lagos, at the Javett Centre in Pretoria as Art well as X Lagos with SMO Contemporary and Unit London. Her work forms part of the Schulting Art Collection, Pizutti Collection, Hort Family Collection, Tiroche Deleon Collection and The Suzie Wong Collection, as well as private collections in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Korea and United States.
‘The Laying of Hands’ runs concurrently with Cheick Diallo’s ‘Taama’, a major solo exhibition of collectible design, sculpture and functional objects. ‘Taama’, meaning “voyage” in the West African language of Malinké is a US solo debut for Cheick Diallo, a pioneering and influential presence on the continent.
‘Taama’ traces the trajectory of Diallo’s pioneering design practice and showcases the full range of his oeuvre, including a selection of iconic and experimental furniture, lighting, sculpture and objects. The exhibition’s design will situate his work within the context of his studio in Bamako, Mali, this is a collaborative approach to fabrication and revival of West African craft. Widely regarded as one of Africa’s pre-eminent designers, Diallo has played an influential role over the course of his three decades-long career. With its mix of conceptual ingenuity and reinvention of centuries-old craftsmanship, his studio has redefined the possibilities for African design.
Born in Bamako, Mali in 1960, Diallo trained as an architect at Rouen School of Architecture and began working at various architecture studios in France. He went on to study furniture design as the first Black African to enroll at ENSCI (The National School of Industrial Design) in Paris from 1992 to 1994.During this time, his Ifen lamp and Rivale chair earned him top honours from the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Since returning to his home city of Bamako to establish his own studio in 2014, he has dedicated himself to working exclusively with everyday materials and local artisanal techniques. His team of craftsmen include Tuareg leather workers, metalsmiths, indigo dyers, carpenters and weavers with whom he collaborates to produce unique objects that interrogate Western notions of luxury. He incorporates waste material from Europe and elsewhere – including salvaged metal, bottle tops, fishing rope, leather and old tyres – transforming them into collectible design that he then re-sells to a majority of European collectors, a concept he calls “return to sender”. Diallo’s sensuously curved chairs and chaise longues woven from colourful nylon thread have earned him particular renown.
Diallo established the Association des Designers Africains in 1996 and has managed a large number of design workshops around Africa, including in Mali, Togo, Congo, South Africa, Morocco, Benin and Ghana. He has exhibited extensively all over the world, including the Hayward Gallery in London, the National Centre for Art and Centre Pompidou in Paris, Kunst Palace in Düsseldorf and a 2012 solo show at the Museum Mandet in France. His work was included in the Vitra Design Museum exhibition ‘Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design and Africa Remix’ at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. His work is in the collections of major institutions, including the Centre Pompidou, Vitra Design Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Philadelphia Museum of Art and Manchester Museum of Art.
Diallo has participated in several group exhibitions with Southern Guild and in the gallery’s presentations at Design Miami (Basel and Miami), The Aspen Art Fair, Untitled Art and Investec Cape Town Art Fair. He has been a trusted mentor and advisor to his peers and younger generation of designers on the continent, as well as an influential member of the Design Network Africa programme led by the Danish Centre for Culture and Development and facilitated by Source, Southern Guild’s sister company. As stated above ‘Taama’ opens on the 13th of February and will run until the 3rd of May 2025 at Southern Guild Los Angeles.
