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Our guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon.

French billionaire François Pinault has appointed museum veteran Bruno Racine director of the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice, Italy. The eighty-three-year-old Pinault—whose luxury

Gardeners found the painting in the wall of the Italian museum it was stolen from almost 23 years ago.

Our critic explores Yuichiro Ukai’s pen-and-marker dinosaurs and samurai, ceramic animals from the Peruvian Amazon and the photography of Vivian Maier.

Howard University in Washington, DC, has received a gift of 152 African American artworks from the collection of arts patron Patricia Turner Walters. Valued at more than $2.5 million, the donation

Robert William Burke Jr., a distinguished gallerist and collector, died on January 3 at his home in Paris at seventy-one years old. Known by his middle name, Burke was the adopted son of Robert William

Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, fired his secretary of culture, Roberto Alvim, after Alvim released a video on his Twitter account on Thursday, January 16, in which he quotes a speech by

IN 2019, WARP RECORDS TURNED THIRTY AND EDITIONS OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC (ECM) HIT FIFTY. The connection felt superficial, and then it didn’t, though I couldn’t immediately figure out why. Both of these

Gelsey Bell, a wide-ranging singer, composer and scholar, is leading listening sessions of works from the MoMA sound archives.

An ambitious new project brings together over 100 artists who have used the accounts of detained migrant children to create work with an urgent purpose

In June last year, a group of volunteer lawyers, doctors and mental health experts visited a US Customs and Border Protection facility in Clint, Texas, which held migrant children separated from their families at the border. Their task was to record the accounts of the unaccompanied minors, some as young as toddlers, in government custody to assure the US was not in violation of the Flores agreement, a 1997 legal settlement that requires the federal government to provide minimum basic levels of care to detained migrants under 18. The conditions the volunteers witnessed there – children sleeping on concrete floors, toddlers in stained clothing denied access to showers, sleeping mats next to filthy open toilets, children chilled to the point of illness – so appalled them that they filed a lawsuit against the federal government, and told their stories publicly.

Related: Abortion is Normal: the emergency exhibition about reproductive rights

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Sprüth Magers, London
The duo’s video shot from a robot burrowing through the pipes beneath Zurich is reminiscent of birth, or a colonoscopy

The high point or, more accurately, the low point of this small exhibition of Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Sprüth Magers, is in the London gallery’s basement. Kanalvideo journeys through the sewers beneath the streets of Zurich, the camera mounted on a robotic vehicle that inspects the tunnels for blockages and leaks. The video is a full hour’s slow and silent burrowing along the cylindrical pipes. What turns and manoeuvrings the unseen robot has to make as it traverses junctions and turns have been edited out, so the journey appears seamless, smooth, unhurried and inexorable. Projected on the end wall of an otherwise empty room, the camera, mounted on the robot, takes us on an apparently interminable trip.

Kanalvideo may lack the complexity and ingenious pyrotechnics of Fischli and Weiss’s best known, and much imitated, The Way Things Go, or the pathos and humour of the pair’s rat-and-bear videos (in which the artists, dressed in animal costumes, encounter the human as well as the natural world), but it has unexpected mystery and magic. We have no idea of the size of the tunnel, as the camera passes over the riffles, rapids and pools of water flowing through the bottom of the pipe, until at one point a rat appears, clambering away from the light as the camera approaches. As we approach junctions in the tube, light catches the rims of sections of pipe where they join, a glowing corona against the blackness of the receding tunnel. After a bit you forget where you are, and think instead of an eye’s pupil staring back from the screen, or views of an eclipsed sun. I think about life’s journey, of being born and of a colonoscopy, and of that Swiss clinic where people go to die.

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The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) has chosen ten art museums to host interns in 2020. In its second year, the paid internship program was established to engage with college students from

The Honolulu Biennial Foundation (HBF) is restructuring and will relaunch as a triennial, now opening in February 2022. Melissa Chiu, the director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, was

Gardeners discovered Portrait of a Lady while clearing ivy at gallery in Piacenza

A painting found hidden in an Italian gallery in December is an authentic Gustav Klimt piece stolen almost 23 years ago, experts have confirmed.

The Portrait of a Lady was one of the world’s most sought-after stolen artworks before it was found concealed in a wall of the Ricci Oddi modern art gallery, the same gallery from where it went missing in the northern city of Piacenza.

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Alex Israel enters the surrealist’s ghostly head, Art & Language put their spin on art history, and Susan Hiller flips a coin to start her London Jukebox – all in your weekly dispatch

Art & Language
The conceptual art pioneers merge Picasso’s Guernica with Jackson Pollock’s drips in a provocative visual “essay” on the history of modern art.
• Sprovieri, London, from 17 January until 13 March.

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The London-based actress finds time for cultural enrichment between starring in “Sex Education” and “The Crown.”

Council promises to turn magnet for anti-social behaviour into ‘family-friendly’ civic space

At 5.30pm in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens, three police officers are gathered around a wheelchair parked in front of a gold postbox commemorating Team GB’s Olympic cycling success. Sitting in the chair, bent double, is a tiny woman with one leg. “Can you sit up, love?” the officers ask, coaxing her gently upright. They know her name. “We just wanted to check you were OK.” She mumbles that she’s fine. As they head off towards the statue of Queen Victoria, the woman immediately slumps forward again.

On a bench near the tram tracks, another drug casualty is frozen – a different kind of statue. He is holding a rolled-up cigarette, long extinguished in the evening drizzle. In a doorway by a branch of Greggs, three men with sleeping bags are sharing some pasties. In front of them, a preacher with a megaphone is telling commuters to repent or burn in hell. Outside Boots, two charity fundraisers working for Shelter flirt with commuters on their way up to Piccadilly station.

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More than six months after an exhibition organized as part of the Aichi Triennale in Japan was shuttered following political and violent threats, the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art in Taiwan announced

This week in our series of exclusive Guardian photography we have Dan Chung’s image from north Pakistan of young girls walking in the mountains following a devastating earthquake

The then Guardian photographer Dan Chung visited Kuz Ganrshal, a remote village in northern Pakistan, in January 2006, three months after a devastating earthquake. He travelled with Oxfam and a local organisation, the Shangla Development Society. These young village girls – colourful against the almost monochrome backdrop – were intrigued by the visitor, following Chung along the snowy mountain path. The village people refused to move to refugee camps after the earthquake, which destroyed nearly 40% of their homes, preferring to cram together with up to five families, along with their livestock, into single dwellings. Oxfam, the only aid agency to have visited the village at the time, distributed blankets, plastic sheets, mats, hygiene kits and tents.

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Frieze has released the list of two-hundred participating galleries for the ninth edition of Frieze New York, which will return to Randall’s Island Park from May 8 to May 10, 2020, with preview days on

The singer resembles a Renaissance Virgin Mary but with a sexual edge in this Instagram photograph

Artist Awol Erizku’s 2017 portrait of Beyoncé pregnant with twins scored 10m likes when it landed on Instagram in 2017, the most an image had ever had on the platform.

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From Waves to Beat Horizon, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days

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The work of Josef and Anni Albers has given a bright, bold new look to a children’s intensive care unit

The role of art in hospitals rarely extends beyond hanging pictures on the wall. But for Josef and Anni Albers, art was always much more than that. Both pioneers of modernism, the couple met in 1922 at the Bauhaus school, an establishment with a revolutionary approach to art. Bauhaus blurred the boundaries between craft, design and fine art and championed the concept of gesamtkunstwerk: the complete work of art, typically in the form of a house.

But why not a hospital department? That was the thinking of the Albers Foundation which, since the couple’s deaths late last century, has worked to continue their legacy. “Josef and Anni both believed that what we experience through our eyes can divert and elate us in unparalleled ways,” explains Nicholas Fox Weber, the foundation’s director. Taking inspiration from the Albers’ geometric patterns and confident use of colour, the foundation has created a bold new look for the children’s intensive care unit at St Mary’s hospital, London.

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Rotunda at National Trust property exploits gloom from scaffolding to stage exhibition

A 200-year-old Italianate palace, hidden away in the Suffolk countryside and currently encased in more than 270 miles of scaffolding, is to hold an exhibition that is only taking place because it is undergoing £5m of conservation works.

Ickworth, a Georgian estate and one of the most photographed of all National Trust properties, will on Satuday open its magnificent but leaky Rotunda to show off world class works of art and objects which few people know are even there.

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A Grolier Club exhibition explores 500 years of women as scientists, midwives, writers, activists, undertakers and more.

The mayor’s remarks come after a former Philadelphia Museum of Art boss was forced to resign from his Erie Art Museum post following a New York Times report.

The Carnegie Museum of Art (CMoA) in Pittsburgh announced four new senior leadership hires. The institution named Chris Fry as director of finance, Stefanie Mohr as director of marketing and engagement,

Following a https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/arts/design/joshua-helmer-philadelphia-museum-art-erie-art-museum.html New York Times investigation that brought to light sexual harassment complaints

I FIRST MET CARLA HERRERA-PRATS in the summer of 2008. I was invited to contribute an essay for her solo show at New York’s Art in General gallery, back when it was still just west of Chinatown on

The Mexican artist Teresa Margolles makes unflinching art about violent death and its aftermath. Her newest photographs and installations are now in New York City.

The National Endowment for the Arts announced the first grant recipients of the 2020 fiscal year. The federal agency will award $27.3 million to 1,187 projects in all fifty states, the District of

Andrew LaMar Hopkins celebrates the rich contributions of 19th-Century New Orleans in his folk art style (and drag).

A new series of projects by international artists will be shown in five cities across the world.

The American Museum of Natural History’s first new space show since 2013 is a head-spinning adventure that makes a statement about the fragility of Earth.

At events across the city, you can commemorate King’s achievements or follow his example of activism and service.

UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, the 1991 film L.A. Story was hands-down the best satire of Los Angeles as told from the perspective of a man experiencing a possible psychotic break. Harris K. Telemacher—a TV

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is awarding $3.93 million to forty-six organizations from nineteen states for its fall 2019 grant cycle. The funds will support visual arts programs,

Nicky Nodjoumi’s dreamy serial paintings; Albert Oehlen’s “mirror paintings”; Clarity Haynes portraits of breasts; Kim Tschang-Yeul’s abstract brand of Pop Art

He’s written letters to the prime minister, joined the Black Panthers and spent a lifetime on art that can provoke, delight and be climbed on. Now, at 84, Araeen has opened a restaurant

• Warning: contains an image some may find disturbing

‘You won’t find anything interesting in my life. I’d rather talk about the work,” says Rasheed Araeen. It is quite the understatement. The 84-year-old Karachi-born artist is no stranger to incident. “My life in Britain has been my struggle against the establishment. It took many forms – within art, outside art, in writing, in performances, in writing letters to the prime minister,” is his own pithy summation.

He first wrote to Tony Blair after “there were ugly things spoken about the Muslims” following the July 2005 bombings in London. “One of the points they kept making was that Muslims were against modernism. They were backwards, uncultured, uncivilised. I wrote and said, ‘Here is an example of what Muslims have contributed to British modernism’.”

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New Orleans and Cuban musicians join in Havana’s annual jazz festival, defying Trump’s efforts to weaken US-Cuba relations

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Jean-François Fourtou, known for his sculptures of animals, has channeled his creative energy to his 25-acre property in Morocco.

At an expansive new exhibition in New York, the director’s defining science fiction opus is explored in detail with help from those who made it with him

Though the calendar reads 2020 we’re still waiting for the future promised in 2001. Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, created concurrently with Arthur C Clarke’s novel, is recognized as one of the most influential motion pictures ever made, endlessly scrutinized from both a story and production point of view. Both avenues are open to New Yorkers and visiting tourists from 18 January through 19 July at the Museum of the Moving Image adjacent to the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens.

Envisioning 2001: Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey is an in-depth examination of how the New York-born director’s desire to make “the proverbial ‘really good’ science fiction film” (as Kubrick wrote to Clarke in a letter preserved under glass in the exhibit) led to “the ultimate trip”, as MGM’s marketing department called the movie once young people seized upon the heady, ambiguous film that exploded into sound and light to go “beyond the infinite” in its most notable sequence.

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French photographer Larry Niehues has been capturing life in the US on 35mm film, from motels to diners and gas stations, to evoke the past by showing ‘all the beauty and destruction, the tradition and innovation, the loud cities and the quiet little spaces’. His work is published in the book Nothing Has Changed

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‘The chapel was built by enslaved people in 1896. The area had been a hotbed for fishing but the rivers are empty now and money is moving to the city’

In October and November 2017, the American writer Sala Elise Patterson and I travelled to the Low Country in Georgia. In recent years, politics has forced people to be polarised, but we figured that there would be a lot more contradictions, even in somewhere like rural Georgia, a place that was probably leaning Republican. We set out to interview people from both sides of the political tracks, and look for continuities, and the paradoxes of everyday life.

The Low Country is sprawling swamp land along the Ogeechee River, or Blackwater River as it is known. We spent months researching beforehand. One of the places we reached out to was St Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in the hamlet of Burroughs. St Bartholomew’s is the last standing chapel of the Ogeechee River Mission and the oldest African American congregation in the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia. The chapel was built by enslaved people in 1896.

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Filmmaker George Lucas’s new museum of narrative art, which is currently under construction in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park, has acquired a significant collection of film posters, photographs, scripts,

The New Museum in New York and the Onassis Foundation are teaming up to create a new space for artists, filmmakers, and designers working in mixed reality. An initiative of the museum’s cultural incubator

In this case, the art-lovers own storage and shipping centers that meet all their needs to rotate, hang and pack away their pieces.

Thirty-five artist projects centered on topics such as migration, surveillance, sexual abuse, and how to make museums agents of change have been named 2020 Creative Capital awardees and will share a

Photography was Andy Warhol’s secret weapon — the architecture of his oeuvre. A new show highlights many of his rarely seen images.