Art Militant: Southside Contemporary Debuts at NADA Miami with Huey Lightbody and Mahari Chabwera

This past week, Southside Contemporary Art Gallery, debuted at Miami Art Week as a NADA exhibitor, positioned within a fair built on discovery, intentional taste, and clarity of program vision. Nicknamed, “SCAG”, the gallery recommenced its narrative of presence, community architecture, and creative practice after their progressive decision to collaborate with Philadelphia-based artist Huey Lightbody after a long term relationship through exhibitions, sales and advisory, along with another regional Virginia artist, Mahari Chabwera for a show grouping.

Huey arrived in South Beach following a successful studio campaign in his new home of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This being his second international art fair within the last quarter while Mahari‘s intro to the international fair system follows a gallery residency at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Both artists and Southside Contemporary, together, have emerged as a regional engine for experimental, body-forward practices grounded in Richmond’s Historic Blackwell neighborhood with curator Ra’Twone "Rosetta" Field’s curatorial stance foregrounding community energetics, artistic risk, and sustainable cultural ecosystems – so a first showing in Miami read not as introduction, but as ignition.

SCAG’s choice to enter NADA makes much sense, especially featured in its TD Bank Curator Spotlight with Kate Wong of SITE Toronto, the New Art Dealers Alliance’s section whose ideals were tailor made for a gallery that prioritizes intention over acceleration. Southside’s work resists fair-week spectacle and invites deceleration, breath, and presence. In our interview after a moving curatorial panel alongside the other recipients of the Spotlight, “Ecologies”, Fields reflected, “This is beautiful, you know. To be here on the beach representing a city that flourishes from the presence of artistry. From Richmond to Miami, this debut is built on intention over spectacle, community over acceleration.”

Huey's works operate as living fields of spiritual atonement and self realization. His surface acts as organism and gestures as archive for inhibition, cadenced to never yield but always centered in a state of renewal. Presenting this “light body” as cosmic and painting as an energy system, much like SCAG when interacting with Huey, you’re immediately able to connect him to, and understand his methods of communicating black embodiment as creative intelligence.

Chabwera’s easy going output along with artistic confidence help you trace her emotions on canvas through her ritualistic earmark for conversation. While technique and process are both very apparent in both artists’ works, what stands out is her use of luminous color fields within one singular spectrum of hues to emulate spiritual infrastructure. The usage of colors and patterns, layering over to create small pockets of underbelly behind a universe resembling radiance guiding lights through shadow, always leaving a glimmer at the end of the tunnel.

When asked about the conversation between both artists, Fields replied, “As I navigated Lightbody and Chabwera’s works, I focused on their independent world building and potential for a “cross-over episode”. I reflected on how they both engaged cyclical processes and existential themes within their practices. For me the worlds intersect across these points and fold into each other through a dialogue encapsulating introspection, ritual, suffering, life, death and hope. Chabwera’s “Aurora Borealis" series serve as anchors: guiding lights illuminating a path for the necessary shadow work we all experience yet ensuring even a glimmer at the end of the tunnel.”

The presentation was visually filled with embodied process, somatic mark-making, ritual movement, luminous gesture-based works. Choreographed gestures give identity and form to blurred subjects that operate as portals and encounter sites extending the lineage of contemporary Black artists using the body as a historical transmitter and archive.