The Best Exhibitions to See Across the Americas This Summer

‘Intervención/Intersección’

Rockefeller Center, New York

5 May – 25 June 2022

Nearly 100 years since Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads (1933) fresco was ignominiously chiselled from the wall, Mexican and Mexico-based artists, designers and architects are once again intervening at the Rockefeller Center. The group exhibition ‘Intervención/Intersección’ brings together 22 artists and collectives who take over the Rink Level Gallery and the Center Plaza. Curated by Su Wu and organized by MASA, a nomadic gallery that creates a bridge between art and design, the project invokes the fluidity of history and storytelling to explore moments of fracture, rehabilitation and repair. – Samantha Ozer

Afro-Atlantic Histories

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

10 April – 17 July 2022

Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s The Last Slave Auction in Saint Louis, Missouri (c.1880) depicts the titular scene but, poignantly, it is hard to tell where the enslaved persons begin and where the white citizens  – or ‘massas’ – end. The skin tones of the crowd vary, blending from white to beige to brown. At the centre of the composition, a mulatto child dressed in virginal white stares back at the viewer, her eyes seemingly saying: ‘I am you; you are me.’ The miscegenation narrative at play here echoes throughout the NGA’s new exhibition, ‘Afro-Atlantic Histories’, serving as a quiet rebuttal to representations of the ‘Black experience’ that historically isolate Black history in the broader context of Western history. – Chase Quinn

Laurie Anderson

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

24 September 2021 – 22 August 2022

The strangely idiosyncratic sentence ‘I dreamed I had to take a test in a Dairy Queen on another planet’ appears twice in ‘Laurie Anderson: The Weather’, an expansive exhibition of the artist’s works across different genres and mediums: once in a text-based wall painting, and again, in an archival image, as a part of a backdrop from Anderson’s 1986 concert film Home of the Brave. The statement’s tone and implied sense of narrative illuminate many of the elements that recur across the artist’s decades of creative output, in fields that include performance art, recorded music and experimental opera. But more than anything else, perhaps, it makes clear that, regardless of the tools she employs, stories themselves are Anderson’s primary artistic medium. – Logan Lockner

Sam Lipp

Derosia, New York

19 May – 25 June 2022

For his solo show at Derosia, ‘Leaving the Factory’, Lipp hunts and gathers images of youthful male hustlers from print magazines and websites. Once niche, the assortment of gay imagery he culls from is now instantly accessible to us, thanks to the way pornography governs our parasocial, post-internet lives. Anyone with a camera can transform into a pornstar. Perhaps this is what is meant by the title of Lipp’s two self-portraits, Pornocracy and Pornocracy 2 (2022). Both paintings are characterized by a humourless intent to turn the self into a porn star in order to stimulate something erotic. – John Belknap

Raphael Montañez Ortiz

El Museo del Barrio, New York

14 April – 11 September 2022

Now the subject of a survey at El Museo del Barrio, the Brooklyn-born artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz is best recognized as one of the founders of the upper Manhattan museum and a key figure in auto-destructive art – a 1960s movement in which objects were violently destroyed to critique social and political conditions. Montañez Ortiz’s infamous ‘Piano Destruction Concert’ series (1966–98) earned the artist a somewhat misguided reputation as a piano-smasher focused on spectacle, rather than as a commentator on the associations between Western ‘high art’ and colonialism. – Mariana Fernández

^{Main image: ‘Raphael Montañez Ortiz: A Contextual Retrospective’, 2022, exhibition view, El Museo del Barrio. Courtesy: the artist and El Museo del Barrio; photograph: Martin Seck}