Ep.254 Trevyn McGowan is the co-founder of Southern Guild gallery in Cape Town and Los Angeles, representing contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora. Over the past two decades, she has dedicated her career to provoking and propelling art and design across the continent by empowering makers both creatively and commercially, elevating the production and presentation of work, and fostering an ethos of community. Trevyn and her husband and business partner, Julian McGowan, pioneered Africa’s collectible design category with the establishment of Southern Guild in 2008, specialising in unprecedented modes of making, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and the ingenuity of the human hand. With the gallery as their primary focus, they have expanded Southern Guild’s programme to encompass contemporary art across multiple media and form cross-continental dialogues between artists. Works by the gallery’s artists are in the collections of museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, Art Institute of Chicago, Philadelphia Museum of Art and National Gallery of Victoria.
Born in Johannesburg in 1967, Trevyn graduated with a degree in dramatic arts from London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and pursued a successful stage, film and television actress for 10 years. She founded Site Specific, a creative interiors agency which she ran for seven years before returning to live in South Africa in 2003. The McGowans established a number of brands and platforms to promote Africa’s creative sector, including GUILD Design Fair, the Design Foundation and the export agency Source (now renamed Design Network Africa), which supplies handcrafted homeware to global retailers. Their pioneering vision earned them places on USA Art + Auction magazine’s ‘POWER 100’ list of the most influential players in the global art world, City Press newspaper’s 100 World Class South Africans and Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business.
Headshot Image courtesy of Jorge Meza and Southern Guild
Gallery https://southernguild.com/
Trevyn and Julian McGowan open New location https://southernguild.com/news/southern-guild-announces-new-tribeca-gallery-opening
World African Artists Unite https://waau-art.com/events/southern-guild-presents-the-artists-kamyar-bineshtarigh-alex-hedison-bonolo-kavula-romeo-mivekannin-zanele-muholi-ziziphonposwa-and-dominique-zinkpe-at-frieze-new-york/
Artforum https://www.artforum.com/news/cape-towns-southern-guild-to-launch-first-us-gallery-in-la-252964/
Cultured Magazine https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2024/02/22/southern-guild-los-angeles-gallery/