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Delaware-based artist Peter Williams has won the Artists’ Legacy Foundation’s 2020 Artist Award, a $25,000 prize granted annually to a painter or sculptor who has made significant contributions to their

A joyous jumble of 60-plus shows in five boroughs, it is a reminder of photography’s power not just to document crisis, but to help imagine better lives.

Piero Gilardi is best known for the polyurethane “Nature Carpets” he has made since the mid-1960s. Depicting realistic landscapes such as seashores, agricultural fields, and woodlands, these rugs vary

Alleging an “orchestrated” attempt to destroy her reputation, ousted director and chief curator Nathalie Bondil is suing the board of directors of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art (MMFA) for $1.5 million.

A dozen midsize US institutions are in line to receive a financial boost from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Art Museum Futures Fund. The new fund is meant to help arts organizations survive the

Dyscalculia | The probation service | Sustainable wrappers | Art and design

A word of cheer to anyone saddened by Prof Brian Butterworth’s letter (20 September): dyscalculia being unheard of in the 1950s and 60s, I struggled miserably with maths at school. As a mature student, I achieved a BA in English literature and history, and later in life studied for an MA in history. Within words I swim as easily as an otter, and thankfully you don’t have to be able to read music in order to sing.
Rita Gallard
Norwich

• Re your article (Ministers to pilot New York-style courts in reforms to sentencing, 16 September), 20 years ago we had a more personal and effective system – the probation service.
John Griffiths
Monmouth, Monmouthshire

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Mwazulu Diyabanza will appear in a Paris court this month after he tried to make off with an African treasure he says was looted. France and its attitude to the colonial past will be on trial, too.

“One thing about Montana,” says Matt Barber, an owner of Tom Morgan Rodsmiths, a custom fly rod shop in Bozeman, “is if there’s a moving body of water, there is probably a trout in it.”

After 21 stages of racing for 176 riders from 22 teams – over a distance of 3,483 km – this year’s Tour has come to an end in Paris. Here are some of our favourite images from the last three weeks

This year’s edition of the Tour de France was due to start in Nice on 27 June but in April, with the Coronavirus pandemic sweeping across Europe, president Emmanuel Macron announced all public events with crowds were to be banned until mid-July to fight the spread of Covid-19. There were fears it wouldn’t take place at all. In the end the race was delayed for the first time during peacetime since its inception in 1903, after event organisers, in agreement with the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), decided to postpone the race, with Nice hosting the Grand Départ on 29 August.

Click on an image and then the ‘i’ icon for its caption info.

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The Guardian’s picture editors select photo highlights from around the world

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Metronome’s digital clock in Manhattan has been reprogrammed to illustrate a critical window for action to prevent the effects of global warming from becoming irreversible.

FOR FIVE DECADES, Beverly Glenn-Copeland quietly transcribed the melodies that floated to him, as he tells it, as if from a distant radio tower. A classically trained singer born to two musicians in

In a world first, Rotterdam’s Boijmans museum has put its entire collection on display in a mammoth new warehouse. As the V&A considers a similar experiment, is this ‘open storage’ model the future?

From a block away, it looks like a craft from a more advanced civilisation has landed in the centre of Rotterdam. The structure is futuristic, with walls of mirrored glass curving up some 40 metres, reflecting the iron-grey clouds and the fractured city skyline. It wouldn’t be surprising if it had a tractor beam instead of a door. As I draw close, a middle-aged Dutch couple are debating whether they like it. They decide not, but snap selfies in front of it anyway.

Rotterdammers are used to high-concept architecture, but what makes this building unusual is its function: it’s a warehouse. Designed by the Dutch firm MVRDV and known as the Depot, it has been created for one of the most well-regarded art museums in the Netherlands, the Boijmans Van Beuningen. When I visit in mid-September, contractors are installing vitrines and polishing concrete floors; in December, art handlers will begin moving in the museum’s collection of Rembrandts, Boschs, Magrittes and Dalís – some 150,000 objects. It will open fully late next year.

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The Kyoto international photography festival’s theme this year is Vision, asking, in these unprecedented times: what kind of future does the world see?

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Post-colonial west African portrait photography is celebrated in a show bringing together the work of some of the region’s most important photographers, including Sanlé Sory, Rachidi Bissiriou, Malick Sidibé and Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou.

Tête à Têtes - West African Portraiture from Independence into the 21st Century is at David Hill Gallery 18 September to 27 November

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The west reduced tantra to a quest for sexual liberation and wellness. But a new show charts its darker depths – from avenging goddesses to blood-drinking and self-decapitation

Make a cursory web search for the term tantra and you will be confronted with thousands of results providing “tips on how to practise tantric sex”, paeans to “the art of tantric massage” and listicles on the choicest “tantric sex positions for you and your partner”. You might be forgiven for thinking you had strayed into an X-rated section of the internet.

Yet tantra is a spiritual philosophy that originated in the Indian subcontinent and dates back to at least the 8th century AD. Meaning “to weave” in Sanskrit, tantra has since found its way into everything from Hinduism and Buddhism to western pop culture. With a focus on worshipping previously non-canonical and non-caste-based Hindu goddesses such as Kali and Chinnamasta, the tantric belief sees the world as imbued with a divine feminine energy – “shakti” – that we must access if we are to transcend our own ego and reach an enlightened liberation from the cycle of reincarnation. To access this energy, certain tantric practitioners believe in performing sexual rites, as well as confronting their own revulsions by covering themselves in funereal ash, drinking blood and wearing aprons made of human bones.

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Pamela Allen is a giant of children’s literature. For 40 years her picture books have delighted children and adults alike, from the prize-winning, problem-solving Mr Archimedes’ Bath in 1980, to a day at the beach with Grandpa and Thomas in 2003. Over her lifetime, they’ve sold more than 6.5m copies worldwide. Now, the State Library of NSW has taken custody of Allen’s archive – an extraordinary 460 original drawings, sketches and notes from her life’s work. A selection of these will be showing in the State Library Galleries until 23 October

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Design is all around us – let it be beautiful and feed our soul

“Art,” wrote William Morris in the socialist newspaper Commonweal, in April 1885, “is man’s embodied expression of interest in the life of man; it springs from man’s pleasure in his life.” Of course, life was not all pleasure. There was grief and pain in abundance, but there was also memory, hope and, above all, the attention that could be paid to the unavoidable business of daily living: “It is the lack of this pleasure in daily work which has made our towns and habitations sordid and hideous, insults to the beauty of the earth which they disfigure, and all the accessories of life mean, trivial, ugly.” This had, Morris argued, a direct, deleterious effect on how people felt about themselves and how they behaved; it exacerbated the divisions between classes and encouraged a dire inauthenticity. In his revolution, pleasure in dailiness would be available to all, in all aspects of life – from town planning all the way down to, say, a porridge bowl and spoon.

The death last week of Terence Conran prompted much distinctly qualified memorialising of the man, and some keen memorialising of things: woks, salad bowls, drinking glasses, duvets. One would hesitate to compare him to Morris for many reasons, not least that the latter was a Marxist (he owned a beautiful copy of Das Kapital) who struggled with squaring his need for beauty with the difficulty of giving everyone the opportunity to produce that beauty. But what they did share was a mission to elevate and value the quotidian. Whatever people felt about Conran’s originality (often dubious), they agreed he made good design “available” – and changed a grey, Spam-fed island in the process.

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From its early days as a whimsical, arthouse space through more recent waves of influencers and pool inflatables, the world’s favourite photo-sharing app has rewired society for good and bad

The most-downloaded app of 2010 made the photographs you took on your phone look way cooler. Vintage-effect filters, artful vignettes and a square-frame layout gave your ordinary snaps a pleasingly nostalgic Polaroid appeal. But 10 years later, barely anyone remembers Hipstamatic. It was a different photo-sharing app, which launched snapping at Hipstamatic’s heels on 6 October 2010, that went on to change the world. Last month more than 1 billion people posted photos on Instagram.

You probably wouldn’t have predicted, from the co-founder of Instagram Mike Krieger’s first post, that you were witnessing the birth of a cultural and economic phenomenon. It was a shot of San Francisco’s South Beach harbour viewed through the industrial-chic steel-framed windows of Pier 38. Only the composition, tilted so that the boat masts angled at 45 degrees, hinted at ambition beyond the pedestrian. But a decade later, Instagram has rewired society. It has changed how we look, what we eat, our relationships, how we vote, where we go on holiday and what we spend our money on. From the Kardashians to avocados to mental health, many stories of the past decade are part of the story of Instagram.

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Ekow Eshun’s photo exhibition aims to look deeper at life in the developing world

Charity imagery taken in the global south too often depicts it as “disease-ridden and exotic” and does not do enough to humanise its subjects, according to the curator of a new exhibition that aims to provide a “deeper” perspective.

Ekow Eshun, the writer, editor and chair of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, said charity photography and reportage could still often misrepresent the people its creators are trying to manufacture empathy for.

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White Cube Bermondsey, London; Modern Art Oxford
Danh Vo lights fires in the gallery with his moving new meditation on God and nature. And what does it mean to be lost in the moment?

My heart stopped to see a familiar letter in this deeply affecting new show by Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo. It was written in 1861, by a French missionary imprisoned in Vietnam. He is in a cage and about to be beheaded. Yet he wishes to reassure his dear father back home that this is nothing: only the cutting of one more flower in the world’s magnificent garden.

The letter is so beautiful as to be a consolation in itself. But what will strike any visitor, seeing it framed on the wall, is that the handwriting appears curiously fluid and modern. It has in fact been immaculately transcribed by the artist’s own father, a Vietnamese calligrapher underemployed in Denmark because he cannot easily read European script. Phung Vo will continue to copy the letter as long as he is able (anyone can commission him, and many have). It is eight years since I last saw one of his copies, so this version is both artwork and proof of life. Vo senior is still working as a calligrapher.

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The cash-strapped London gallery is to debate the sale of a Renaissance masterpiece that could fetch more than £100m

When the British artist John Constable first saw Michelangelo’s marble masterpiece, known as the Taddei Tondo, in the Royal Academy, he said it was “one of the most beautiful works of art in existence”.

The 515-year-old sculpture had been given to the London gallery in 1829 following the death of its owner, Lady Margaret Beaumont, as an inspiration to students in the academy’s schools.

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Gregory Crewdson creates meticulously staged landscapes that exaggerate the post-industrial desperation of small-town America

Gregory Crewdson’s photographs understood social distancing before it became reality. His landscapes, which have a broken-down, apocalyptic cast, usually include a few figures, set adrift in different ways, apparently unable to connect with one another, or with the place in which they find themselves. Redemption Center is the first of a series of 16 taken between 2018 and 2019 on the edge of a town called Pittsfield, about 20 miles from Crewdson’s home in rural Massachusetts. He calls the series – huge pictures, seven feet across – An Eclipse of Moths after the effect of a swarm of insects around an outside lamp, that causes the light to dim.

Crewdson, 57, who is director of graduate studies in photography at Yale University, spends a long time scouting locations, then embellishing them, painting billboards, towing in car wrecks. He will contact businesses and authorities and ask them not to mow the verges or collect the rubbish for a while. Fog machines provide a dispiriting miasma; the puddles come from water trucks. Lighting on 40-foot cranes casts an otherworldly, even-handed light over the scene – nothing is out of focus; the list of credits that accompanies the pictures is like the roll call at the end of a movie, a legion of best boys and gaffers and key grips.

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As Plymouth marks 400 years since the colonists set sail, the high price paid by Native American tribes is now revealed in an exhibition

For a ship that would sail into the pages of history, the Mayflower was not important enough to be registered in the port book of Plymouth in 1620. Pages from September of that year bear no trace of the vessel, because it was only only 102 passengers and not cargo, making it of no official interest.

The port book is one of the many surprising objects at Mayflower 400: Legend & Legacy, the inaugural exhibition of the Box in Plymouth, Devon, which will open to the public later this month, and which is part of the city’s efforts to mark the 400th anniversary of the ship’s Atlantic crossing.

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Artist Annalee Davis was walking in fields once used for sugarcane in her Barbados homeland when she spotted unfamiliar plants. “I was taught to see them as weeds but now I understand their value offering biodiversity to exhausted land and their historical use in bush medicine.” Davis started pressing and using specially mixed Victorian paint to draw these plants on old plantation ledger pages. Colonialism wiped out Barbados’s biodiversity in the 17th century by replacing local vegetation with the monoculture of intensively farmed fields of sugarcane, but wild plants are proliferating again. The series is now on show at Haarlem Artspace, Derbyshire, until 11 October as part of re:rural. “I want to use the plants to learn to listen to the land in another way and acknowledge its trauma,” she says.

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Artist Jonathan Yeo’s app shares the slow creative process of his remote sittings with the celebrity chef

Jamie Oliver is the master of “bashing together” a quick “pukka” supper in front of his TV audience. His old friend, the leading portraitist Jonathan Yeo, produces his acclaimed works of celebrities and politicians over hours of sittings.

This weekend they unveiled the fruits of a new “slow technology” designed by Yeo to provide a unique demonstration of the long art of painting a likeness.

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Ephemeral works of art, like Maurizio Cattelan’s creation out of fruit, can often pose conservation challenges for the museums that have them.

The aftermath of the fire at the Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, protests in Louisville and Portland, migrants in the Mediterranean Sea and the enduring impact of Covid-19: the most striking images from around the world

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Known for his muscular and clean-lined furniture, Mr. Liaigre designed the influential Mercer hotel in SoHo, as well as the homes of Rupert Murdoch and others.

The artist Ragnar Kjartansson has built his reputation around endurance works, and a Milanese church will host his latest: the same romantic tune repeated hour after hour, day after day, for a month.

New York’s Marlborough Gallery swapped lawsuits with former president Max Levai in the New York State Supreme Court earlier this week, with the gallery seeking $8 million and accusing Levai of fraud

The organizers of the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC) are facing a storm of dissent over their late-breaking decision to cancel this year’s edition of the fair owing to the Covid-19

Brighton exhibition collates ‘snaps’ Geoff MacCormack took touring with the star in the 70s

It was a conversation that would change Geoff MacCormack’s life forever. In 1973, MacCormack, a musician and childhood friend of David Bowie, got a phone call from the artist, then known as Ziggy Stardust, asking him to join an expanding lineup of his band, the Spiders From Mars.

MacCormack, who was selling advertising space for a London construction paper at the time, took him up on the offer and set off on a three-year tour in which he played in various iterations of Bowie’s backing band and, crucially, took dozens of photographs.

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The monks of a German abbey hope new windows by the renowned artist will draw visitors and secure the community’s future.

Tribute that adds abandoned shopping trollies to the impressionist image of water lilies to be sold at Sotheby’s auction

Street artist Banksy’s version of Claude Monet’s impressionist masterpiece will go on sale at Sotheby’s London gallery for an estimated £3-5m.

The painting, called Show me the Monet, was created in 2005. It is framed around Monet’s famous water lilies picture but is filled with jarring images of upside-down shopping trolleys and a traffic cone bobbing in the water.

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The Taiwanese artist Lee Mingwei’s “Our Labyrinth” comes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a New York touch from the choreographer Bill T. Jones.

Contemporary sculptures by Jeffrey Gibson and others, part of “Monuments Now” at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, draw on the past to look toward the future.

Gillian Wearing paints her self-portrait, bronze age mysteries are unearthed, and Grayson Perry maps the mess of the American psyche – all in your weekly dispatch

Gillian Wearing
A stunningly intelligent and sensitive lockdown project in which the celebrated video artist set out to paint her self-portrait.
• Maureen Paley, London, until 25 October.

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UNDETERRED BY THE PRESENT HEALTH CRISIS, the Fifty-Eighth New York Film Festival will premiere its annual selections of world cinema virtually and, in Brooklyn and Queens, in drive-in screenings—the

The Dutch photographer and film-maker’s 20-year project preserves moments from a part of LA that the US would rather forget about

The Dutch photographer Dana Lixenberg’s 20-year documentary project Imperial Courts features the black and Latino inhabitants and external spaces of an unloved social housing project in Watts, Los Angeles. Notorious as a “problem area” where the Crips gang originated, it’s socially and psychically cut off from other neighbourhoods, sited on the edge of the freeway’s brutalist barrier.

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Marking the 15-year anniversary of the New London Architecture galleries, the Changing Face of London revisits its 2005 exhibition to capture the transformation of the city’s famous landmarks. Aerial photographer Jason Hawkes talks us through his images

I have been photographing aerial views over London from helicopters for more than 25 years. I first flew in the capital when I was 22, and looking at images from then it is incredible how much some areas have changed.

We normally fly at an altitude of 750ft to 2,450ft. Things used to be a little more relaxed, which is why for instance the Battersea image from 15 years ago was shot from a much lower height than when I redid it last week.

Battersea power station, River Thames, Battersea and Pimlico, 2005 and 2020

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The exhibition, at Alison Jacques gallery in London until 1 October, focuses on Parks’ intimate and nuanced portraits of the legendary athlete and human rights advocate Muhammad Ali. Receiving unprecedented access to the champion, Parks met Ali in 1966 during his training in Miami, before flying to London to document the run up to his fight against Henry Cooper

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From a grand manor house to a romantic little coastal cottage

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Memories from the public – however hazy – will form part of an online archive charting 50 years of the music festival

Most festivalgoers’ memories after Glastonbury are a little hazy – or not fit for public consumption – but London’s V&A museum is preparing to publish some of the more tangible and presumably family friendly ones as part of a new online archive project.

The V&A has held archive material from the festival since partnering in 2014, including “posters, stage designs, costumes, interviews, films and other memorabilia”. This initiative will make it available online along with contributions from the public, to mark Glastonbury’s 50th anniversary this year. Following funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the aim is for a fully searchable, open source public database to launch in 2021.

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Abdelkader Benchamma This fall, Galerie Templon’s Brussels space is hosting Abdelkader Benchamma’s first solo exhibition in Belgium. The artist is known for his use of black ink drawings—site-specific

The street artist’s effort to use trademark law instead of copyright to protect his paintings from commercial knockoffs is thwarted by a European Union decision.

A rezoning proposal that has been floating around is finally up for city review. This kind of development is just what New York needs now.

“American Struggle” at the Met shows an artist searching out bits of the nation’s history that have been edged out, and making visible the fight for racial equality.

Mohamed Bourouissa, known for his photographs of marginalized and economically disenfranchised people, has been announced as the recipient of the 2020 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize. The