Great Shows to See During Frieze New York 2025

‘Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers’ | Guggenheim | 18 April 2025 – 18 January 2026

New York-based Chicagoan Rashid Johnson is taking over the Guggenheim’s rotunda for this 90-work survey of his 30-year career. Things took off for Johnson when he was included in Thelma Golden’s landmark 2001 exhibition ‘Freestyle’ at Harlem’s Studio Museum – a show also credited with introducing the term ‘post-black art’, with which Johnson is often associated. Known for an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates history, philosophy and art history, Johnson pairs the explicitly gestural with the conceptually rigorous, combining materials and themes that reference African American culture with an analysis of the intellectual debates surrounding that culture’s commodification, as well as notions of race and class within contemporary art. The exhibition covers his wall-based works, including his famous black-soap paintings and sprayed text pieces, alongside film, video and a conceptual centrepiece, Sanguine, which includes a built-in piano for musical performances. There will also be an accompanying events programme. 

Rashid Johnson is showing as part of Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Frieze New York (Stand B8).

‘Alanis Obomsawin: The Children Have to Hear Another Story’ | MoMA PS1 | 27 March – 25 August

Now 92, Alanis Obomsawin is one of Canada’s most revered documentary filmmakers, a practice that she has pursued for 70 years along with art, activism and music. Her works often address First Nations issues, and this retrospective includes documentaries such as Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993), which charts a Mohawk battle against the expansion of a golf course into their sacred burial lands (a story that sounds both depressing and timely), as well as less well known works, such as 1971’s Christmas at Moose Factory, an animated short that uses children’s drawings.

‘Jack Whitten: The Messenger’ | MoMA | Until 2 August

It might be that Jack Whitten’s eccentric journey into art-making gave him the imaginative lateral thinking to become one of the great innovators of post-war American painting, as well as the raw anger that fueled both his creativity and politics. Born in segregated Alabama in 1939, Whitten arrived in New York at the age of 21 as a Civil Rights activist before deciding to take up art. He then undertook another journey, moving from abstract expressionism to forge a unique approach that deconstructed the material hierarchy of conventional painting. Whitten treated paint almost as an industrial material – a nod perhaps to the menial blue-collar career expectations of many Black men of his generation. He swept it across the floor, cut sheets of hardened acrylic into tesserae and generally deprived it of its inherent cultural status to reinvigorate it. Across his six-decade career, Whitten also made sculptures, works that more explicitly reference the violence he had experienced in his life: upright blades set in mounts, quasi-ritual items and denuded figures. This retrospective is the first to span all eras and every medium of Whitten’s practice, through more than 175 paintings, sculptures and works on paper. Simultaneously ancient and contemporary, process-driven and instinctual, Whitten’s art explores history, language and human fallibility – moving beyond the constraints of political messaging to operate on a mythic plane.

Jack Whitten is showing as part of Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Frieze New York (Stand B8).

‘Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night’ | Whitney Museum of American Art | 8 February – 6 July

Christine Sun Kim’s identity and experience as a Deaf artist profoundly informs her work in ways that are both inclusive and genre-defying. The California native is fascinated by communication and notation—music, sign language, the written word, infographics and pictorial renderings of abstraction—creating work that is intriguing, playful and elusive. Her drawings, videos, sculptures and installations explore the non-auditory, political dimensions of sound, particularly the ways in which society places such trust in the spoken (and listened-to) word. The 2024 site-specific mural Ghost(ed) Notes—recreated here across the Whitney’s eighth floor—renders her practice on a huge scale. Also at the Whitney is a survey of Amy Sherald, renowned for her stylized and often disconcertingly impersonal paintings of Black Americans, including, most notably, her epochal portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in 2018. Sherald’s works have an imposing directness in person, so the opportunity to see them in this context should not be missed.

Christine Sun Kim is showing as part of François Ghebaly’s presentation at Frieze New York (Stand D8). Amy Sherald is showing as part of Hauser & Wirth’s presentation at Frieze New York (Stand B8).

Carolyn Lazard: ‘Two-way’ | Artists Space | Until 10 May 

Until 2020, all medical mannequins in the US were white. That bald fact is one of the points of departure for Carolyn Lazard’s ‘Two-way’. Lazard has frequently used ideas of chronic illness and disability in their work, including the piece Extended Stay at the 2019 Whitney Biennial: a wall-mounted hospital TV that changes channels every 30 seconds. ‘Two-way’ presents a pair of films; in Vital, a Black person – played by the artist and filmmaker Martine Syms – goes for their first prenatal appointment; in Fiction Contract, medical professionals in a ‘simulation centre’ at New York’s Elmhurst Hospital enact various challenging childbirth scenarios. The ‘fiction contract’ of the title refers to a document signed by participants in simulations agreeing to treat them as if they are real, while knowing that they are not. The two films offer complementary ideas of identity, reproduction and institutional perception; the background to ‘Two-way’ is that brown-skinned mannequins were finally introduced to medical training in an effort to help ‘eliminate disparities in maternal mortality between Black and white women’. Life is a two-way street, often determined by accidents of birth, but some of those ‘accidents’, Lazard suggests, pose troubling questions. 

‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ | Metropolitan Museum of Art | 10 May – 26 October

From the ‘dressing up’ of enslaved servants by plantation owners in the 1700s and 1800s to LA’s Zoot Suit Riots during WWII to Muhammad Ali’s statement bespoke tailoring, the Black dandy has been a much-debated and politicized figure in the US for more than 250 years, with its origins in the performative male fashion obsessions of the eighteenth century and the Atlantic slave trade. This Met Costume Institute exhibition tells that story through a huge collection of garments, drawings, paintings, photographs and film, to present Black dandyism as having a very specific role in embodying ideas of power and race across the Black diaspora, while also sartorially ring-fencing Black male identity against the global consumerist reductiveness of ‘street style’. The story is brought up to date with the sapeurs of Congo, who appropriate and reprocess Western masculine style into ritualistic, self-affirming performance. 

‘Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop’ | Museo del Barrio | 24 April – 3 August

Born in the Brooklyn projects in 1955 to newly immigrated Puerto Rican parents, Candida Alvarez emerged in the New York art scene of the 1970s treading a precarious line between figuration and abstraction, a tension that can be seen as a reflection of her own ambiguous social status and position as a female diasporic artist in a predominantly white male art world. Initially known for her intense charcoal drawings and oil paintings on wooden panels, Alvarez later developed 3D and conceptual dimensions to her practice to incorporate games, texts and representational systems across different media, including embroidery and nailed boards. This important and wide-ranging show of five decades of her art at El Museo del Barrio takes its title from one of her 1996 pieces that uses the symbol and form of the circle, a recurrent motif throughout all the various phases of her work.

“Sonia Gomes: Ô Abre Alas!” | Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York | 7 May – December

In May 2025, two landmark events coincide in upstate New York: the reopening of Storm King Art Center and the first museum solo show in the US devoted to Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes. The 500-acre sculpture park – set in the Arcadian splendour of the Hudson Valley – has recently invested more than $50 million in new facilities and acquired works by Arlene Shechet and Lee Ufan. Now in her late 70s, Gomes came to international prominence after her inclusion in the 2015 Venice Biennale, and in 2018 became the first living Afro-Brazilian woman to have a solo show at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Born in the former textile centre of Caetanópolis, she uses discarded and secondhand fabric – both industrial and domestic – in her work, along with found objects and natural materials such as logs. In another first, her new work is her only site-specific outdoor installation to date, with pieces suspended in a tree on Storm King’s Museum Hill. In a 2023 interview with frieze magazine, Gomes said: ‘I have an ongoing process in which linear time does not apply. I think artists’ time is different, and it must be respected. I prefer to live in a spiral time.’ It will be fascinating to see how her work responds to such a dramatic and out-of-time setting.

Sonia Gomes is showing as part of Mendes Wood DM’s presentation at Frieze New York (Stand B7).

Further Information

Frieze New York, The Shed, 7 – 11 May, 2025. Limited early-bird tickets are on sale – don’t miss out, buy yours now. Alternatively, become a member to enjoy premier access, exclusive guided tours and more.

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Frieze New York is supported by global lead partner Deutsche Bank, continuing its legacy of celebrating artistic excellence on an international scale.

A dedicated online Frieze Viewing Room will open in the week before the fair, offering audiences a first look at the presentations and the opportunity to engage with the fair remotely. 

^{Main image: Rashid Johnson, Untitled Anxious Audience, 2019 (detail). Ceramic tile, black soap, and wax 403.9 ×. 457.2 × 7.6cm. Courtesy: the artist © Rashid Johnson, 2024. Photo: Martin Parsekian}