In a video posted Monday by Frieze, Jordan Carter, curator and co-department at Dia Art Foundation makes a tour of Chelsea galleries and museums—a perfect entry for anyone visiting NYC for the first time, or for anyone venturing out from the cold for the first time this Spring. Starting at the Whitney, he explores the murals of Christine Sun Kim, who uses musical ghost notation as her entry into visual ASL [American Sign Language].

Next up, the High Line, where he interviews Ivan Argote about his colossal pigeon sculpture, Dinosaur. Then he returns to his home turf, Dia Chelsea, where artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen’s solo installation is on view. Across the way, at Hauser & Wirth, he takes a dive into Camille Henrot’s querulous sculptures that explore psychological motives of both humans and dogs along with curatorial Director Alexis Lowry. 

One block over, Carter catches up with Demie Kim, managing director of Tina Kim Gallery, for a view of its upcoming 10-year anniversary and its special Frieze Week plans. Following are the specifics of the shows you’ve just glimpsed in Carter’s video, plus a link to the upcoming Frieze NY Week at The Shed, along the High Line. Your own tour could end, like Carter’s, with drinks at the legendary Hotel Chelsea, at 222 West 23^rdStreet. Go here for the Frieze NY guide to Chelsea galleries, institutions and hot spots. To watch this Jordan Carter video go here Frieze returns to The Shed in May with more than 65 of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries and the acclaimed Focus section led by Lumi Tan. Info

Christine Sun Kim All Day, All Night at the Whitney

In works full of sharp wit and incisive commentary, Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980, Orange County, California) engages sound and the complexities of communication in its various modes. Using musical notation, infographics, and language—both in her native American Sign Language (ASL) and written English—she has produced drawings, videos, sculptures, and installations that often explore non-auditory, political dimensions of sound. In many works, Kim draws directly on the spatial dynamism of ASL, translating it into graphic form. By emphasizing images, the body, and physical space, she upends the societal assumption that spoken languages are superior to those that are signed. More

Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 

Ivan Argote | Dinosaur at the High Line

For the fourth High Line Plinth comission, Ivan Argote created a meticulously hand-painted, humorous sculpture that challenges the grandeur of traditional monuments. Instead of celebrating a significant historical figure,  Argote chose  to canonize the familiar New York City street bird. Posed on a concrete plinth that resembles the sidewalks and buildings that New York’s pigeons call home, Dinosaur reverses the typical power dynamic between bird and human, towering 21 feet above the countless pedestrians and car drivers that travel down 10th Avenue.

Reflecting on the work’s title, Argote notes, “The name Dinosaur makes reference to the sculpture’s scale and to the pigeon’s ancestors who millions of years ago dominated the globe, as we humans do today… the name also serves as a reference to the dinosaur’s extinction. Like them, one day we won’t be around anymore, but perhaps a remnant of humanity will live on—as pigeons do—in the dark corners and gaps of future worlds. I feel this sculpture could generate an uncanny feeling of attraction, seduction, and fear among the inhabitants of New York.”  More

The Plinth on the High Line, at 30^th Street and 10^th Avenue, New York, NY 

Steve McQueen at Dia Chelsea 

Steve McQueen at Dia Chelsea unites three works that explore narratives of the African diaspora from across two decades of the artist’s career. The presentation centers on Sunshine State (2022, above), a two-channel, dual-sided video projection that enlists a story about McQueen’s father to examine notions of identity and racial stereotypes. 

Also on view are Exodus (1992–97), one of McQueen’s earliest works, a film which follows two West Indian men through the streets of London, and Bounty (2024), a brand-new set of photographs featuring flowers found in Grenada, the artist’s parents’ place of origin. Taken together with Bass (2024), McQueen’s commission for Dia Beacon, on view concurrently, these two presentations interweave the personal and political across diverse spaces and media as McQueen meditates on his ancestry and the grand historical subject of the Middle Passage. More

Dia Chelsea, 537 West 22^nd Street, New York, NY

Camille Henrot | A Number of Things at Hauser & Wirth

Henrot’s latest ‘Abacus’ sculptures unite the utilitarianism of the ancient calculating tool with the arches and spirals of a children’s bead maze—a toy popularized in the 1980s as a heuristic diversion in pediatric waiting rooms and nursery schools. Through these formal associations, an instinctive sense of play collides with the learned impulse to search out patterns and impose order. With their biomorphic contours, opaline patinas and quadruped or biped anatomies, these works seem charged with a lifeforce of their own. Hovering between pure abstraction and their multivalent referents, Henrot’s bronzes invite our unfettered, sensuous engagement, even as they allude to the symbolic systems that tyrannize our imaginations.

These large-scale sculptures, presented together with vibrant new paintings from the artist’s ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series, address the friction between a nascent sense of imagination and society’s system of signs. More

Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22^nd street, New York, NY

Vintage20 | Design for Living at Tina Kim Gallery

The exhibition celebrating the legacy of Manhattan-based design firm Vintage20, curated by Adam Charlap Hyman, pays homage to founder Jae Chung’s visionary approach to midcentury modernism. The show features seminal design pieces by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Jean Prouvé, and George Nakashima. 

The installation unfolds as a series of domestic vignettes, including a living room, dining room, and study—a restaging of Chung’s iconic study featuring a rare Prouvé Congo table—and reflect Vintage20’s signature pairing of design and fine art, with works by Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and more. Coinciding with the publication of an eponymous book, which chronicles Vintage20’s landmark exhibitions from 2005 to 2019, the show highlights the firm’s lasting impact on the dialogue between art and design.

Modern and contemporary masterpieces are installed throughout the living spaces, embodying Vintage20’s interdisciplinary ethos of showcasing art and design in tandem. Works on view include silkscreens by Andy Warhol; sculptures by Alexander Calder and Louise Bourgeois; paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sterling Ruby, and Luc Tuymans; and contemporary interpretations of the moon jar by Kang Minsoo and Jane Yang D’Haene.

Tina Kim Gallery, 525 West 21^st Street, New York, NY Info