Great Shows to See During Frieze New York 2025

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

Chicagoan Rashid Johnson is taking over the Guggenheim’s famous rotunda for this 90-work survey of his 30-year career, which really took off with his inclusion in the landmark 2001 exhibition ‘Freestyle’ at the Studio Museum (also credited with the origin of the term ‘post-black art’, with which Johnson is often associated). Known for an interdisciplinary approach to art-making that incorporates history, philosophy and art history, Johnson has an imposing standing within US contemporary art. The exhibition will cover his 2D works, including his 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.

‘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.

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

While Christine Sun Kim’s identity and experience as a Deaf artist profoundly informs her work, it does so in ways that are both inclusive and genre-defying. The California native (who famously sign-interpreted the US national anthem at the 2020 Superbowl) is fascinated by communication and notation – music, sign language, the written word, infographics and pictorial renderings of abstraction – creating a body of 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. Her 2024 site-specific mural Ghost(ed) Notes – recreated here across the Whitney’s eighth floor – renders her practice on a huge scale. (While you’re at the Whitney, check out its show of Amy Sherald [9 April – 10 August], renowned for her paintings of Black Americans, including, most notably, her epochal portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in 2018.)

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 grooming, 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 importance 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.

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}