Artsy has announced the 2027 edition of The Artsy Vanguard, its annual feature spotlighting 10 emerging artists shaping contemporary art. Now in its ninth year, the list is chosen by Artsy's editorial and curatorial teams from nominations submitted by galleries, with hundreds of names put forward each year.

The 2026 edition, the feature's eighth, was built around the theme of reimagining reality and included artists such as Manyaku Mashilo, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Heidi Lau. The Vanguard has become one of the most closely watched early-career lists in the art world, with past artists going on to museum exhibitions, major solo shows and significant market attention.

Among the 2027 cohort is South African painter Mmangaliso Nzuza, whom Artsy highlighted in its announcement. Artsy's first published profile in the series features Sammi Lynch, whose luminous landscape paintings begin as pastel drawings made outdoors. Born in 1998 in Empangeni and based in Cape Town, Nzuza paints large-scale figurative oils in which weighted figures find ease in invented landscapes, where bodies of water become sites of ritual cleansing and wheat fields suggest harvest and the passage of time. His debut solo exhibition, An Open Letter, opened at Southern Guild in Cape Town in August 2024.

Southern Guild has felt the effect of the list before. After Mashilo's Vanguard feature in 2026, the gallery heard from nine times as many collectors through Artsy within three months, a figure Artsy is using to show galleries what the recognition can change.

To mark the announcement, Artsy will host a webinar on Friday, November 6, at 10am EST and 3pm GMT, with Southern Guild senior director Jana Terblanche and Nzuza joining Artsy's Casey Lesser to discuss how a gallery finds and develops an emerging artist, what Vanguard recognition does for collector interest, and how galleries can reach collectors worldwide.