The Best Shows to See Across the Americas This Spring

Christine Sun Kim | Whitney Museum of American Art, New York | 8 February – 6 July

As someone who only speaks English, encountering the intricacies of American Sign Language (ASL) is like discovering quantum mechanics. Many works in ‘All Day All Night’, Christine Sun Kim’s mid-career survey at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, feature the artist’s native ASL, either manually signed with the body or graphically rendered in a notation of her invention (often accompanied by English captions). Manual ASL offers more ways of communicating than spoken languages composed of phonetic utterances and tonal expressions. For example, in manual ASL, facial expressions – which are paired with hand and body movements – not only signify affect but also convey phenomena ranging from grammar to surface texture. – Geoffrey Mak 

Ilê Sartuzi | Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo | 15 March – 15 June

During my visit to Ilê Sartuzi’s current exhibition, ‘Trick’, at Museu de Arte Contemporânea in São Paulo, an alarm went off, blaring for what felt like an eternity. As if to assert my innocence, I remained seated quietly in one of the galleries, only to quickly realize that the disruption was, in fact, a work from the series ‘Propositions for Museum Security Systems’ (2023); likewise the strange voice I had heard upon my arrival yelling, ‘Turn me off!’ Indeed, the entire exhibition is peppered with moments like this. Nearby, Vigilant (2023–25) comprises a CCTV camera spinning rapidly in the centre of an empty room; alongside hangs a monitor displaying the captured footage. The completely blurred images that result from this restless digital ‘eye’ prompt us to reflect on the paranoid notion of total surveillance and the disorienting concept of the panopticon as a mechanism of discipline and control. – Mateus Nunes

Alioune Diagne | Templon Gallery, New York | 6 March – 1 May

Upon encountering Alioue Diagne’s signature figuro-abstro paintings in his first New York solo show, ‘Jokkoo’, at Templon Gallery, I was struck by his alchemical approach to image-making. In each canvas, Diagne inverts Charles Darwin’s Tree of Life – a biological diagram that traditionally depicts the hierarchical evolution of life forms – and interrogates the foundations of representation, where language and science intersect to shape our understanding of humanity.

Up close, tiny curvy glyphs pulse through a wheel of bright colours. From afar, pointillist-esque scenes of Black people in Senegal and New York come into semi-focus, as Diagne’s otherworldly script deconstructs skin tones and landscapes into molecular structures, dissolving defining details into negative space. We are introduced to a selection of quotidian scenes: Saay- Saay si – Police Misconduct (2024) presents a clash between officers and protestors, while Pénc Mi – Meeting Place (2024) depicts a peaceful, adolescen crowd. Nearby, Demb ak Tey – Past and Present (2025) features staggered rows of women and children arriving in a metropolitan city. Drawing kinship from Hanoi script, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Arabic calligraphy, Diagne’s technique blurs the lines between various communication systems, grounding his paintings in universality. – Shameekia Shantel Johnson 

Jack Whitten | MoMA, New York | 23 March – 2 August

I need a new word. The trouble with calling these works ‘paintings’ is that the term cannot convey or contain what Jack Whitten was doing with paint. The pieces on view in ‘The Messenger’ – Whitten’s retrospective at MoMA – exceed painting: they reach past the medium, live beyond its edges. In these paintings-that-exceed-painting, we find a study of movement and physics; a discourse on photo theory; a language and a philosophy of language; a music. Above all, we find ourselves with inquiry, within ongoing and open questions. Throughout the show, surprises lie everywhere in wait. How delightful it is to be gripped and renewed by them. – Zoë Hopkins

Julien Creuzet | The Bell, Providence | 20 February – 1 June

Rooted in and routed through the Black Atlantic, Julien Creuzet’s exuberant exhibition at Brown University’s The Bell powerfully charts Afro-diasporic presence. Titled ‘Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon’, the show builds on the artist’s eponymous French pavilion presentation at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Encompassing sculpture, video, poetry, performance and sound, the installation embodies what Édouard Glissant described in Poetics of Relation (1990) as échos-monde: resonances awakening our positionality across rhizomatic connections. – Rebecca Rose Cuomo

^{Main image: Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader, ATTENTION, 2022, installation view. Courtesy: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; photograph: Ron Amstutz}