BALTIC 39, Newcastle upon Tyne, 3 April – 17 May 2015
What do the German cultural theorist Theodor Adorno, the jazz space-cadet Sun Ra and the Turner Prize-winning British video artist Elizabeth Price have in common? A new group show at Baltic’s Newcastle project space. Adorno, it transpires, was an original vinyl enthusiast, publishing a 1927 essay, Curves of a Needle, about the potential of record players. The exhibition takes its title from the essay, and uses it as a departure point to consider vinyl as a social signifier, craft object and idea disseminator.

Union, London, 3 April – 12 June 2015
Grimy, gritty and Guston-like in their cartoonish qualities, the huge paintings of recently elected Academician Rose Wylie stew a wide range of subjects, from forms associated with femininity, sometimes drawn from cinema, to images of people at play in nature. London’s Union gallery presents a series of the artist’s recent ‘Yellow Desert Paintings’, which includes Pink Table Cloth (Long Shot) (Film Notes) (2013). Here the Hollywood film Syriana (2005) is evoked both in scrawled red text and a desert scene that shows Arab men – white blobs for taubs – dwarfed around a huge pink table.

Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, 3 April – 8 November 2015
Alex Hoda has an omnivorous attitude to sculpture, feeding on past styles such as Surrealism and the Baroque, then drinking them down with a fascination for found objects ranging from kitsch ceramics to sex toys. The results are abstracted, gut-wrenchingly restless forms. The RA Schools alumnus presents a survey show at Cass Sculpture Foundation from this week. The sculpture park is worth a visit on its own; its varied, major outdoor works have been added to recently by an exquisite spindly sculpture by Glaswegian Sara Barker.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 1 April – 31 August 2015
Eric Ravilious’s elegant engravings and lithographs famously adorned books and ceramics, but his exceptional graphic sensibility can also be seen in his watercolour works, in which reduced forms are composed in magical colour. The English painter’s watercolours are spotlit in a major show at Dulwich Picture Gallery from this week, an exhibition which has already received some rave reviews.

Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, 3 April – 14 June 2015
Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, 30 June – 18 October 2015
Glenn Ligon’s latest works shown in London’s Thomas Dane Gallery were minimalist paintings screenprinted with text relating to a case of police brutality in 1960s Harlem. As the curator of a new exhibition in Nottingham, Ligon mines a similar heady mix, selecting predominantly American post-war and contemporary works – from Pop Art (Andy Warhol) to Conceptualism (Adrian Piper) – that examine social-political circumstance and, in particular, black experience.

Sam Phillips (@SamP_London) is Editor of RA Magazine.