News

There’s always a lot of junk in galleries. But here, the garbage is pure gold. The late and forever great Candy Jernigan (1952–1991) had a thing for the discarded and defiled, be it pop-tops, moist

The Museum of Modern Art has been gifted forty-five works of contemporary African art from collector Jean Pigozzi. The donation includes a selection of sculptures by Romuald Hazoumè and Bodys Isek

In describing the opening scene of Godard’s Passion (1982), Harun Farocki has remarked that the shot’s unsteady pan—which follows an airplane’s disintegrating white contrail—is actually a register of

“[Unsubscribe]” is framed as a show about artists who “engage questions of e-identity formation and social interactions that play out in our imaginations,” exploring the avatars we embody online and

The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town has added Storm Janse van Rensburg to its curatorial team. As the new senior curator, Van Rensburg will work with executive director

The Worcester Art Museum (WAM) in Massachusetts announced today that it has received a $10 million donation from the C. Jean and Myles McDonough Charitable Foundation-the largest gift in its 123-year

The Getty Foundation has revealed the recipients of its 2019 Keeping It Modern grants, which support architectural conservation projects across the globe. More than $1.6 million will go to ten structures,

Emma Lavigne has been named the next president of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. She will become the first woman to take the helm of the institution in its seventeen-year history. She comes to the arts

Two Sotheby’s investors, Eli Goffman and Shiva Stein, have filed a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan in an attempt to block the $3.7 billion sale of the auction house to BidFair USA, which is owned

From Victorian days out to 21st-century staycations, our coastal resorts are an enduring attraction. These images are from the exhibition Seaside: Photographed, which is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, until 8 September and tours to three other venues in 2020: John Hansard gallery, Southampton, Grundy art gallery, Blackpool, and Newlyn art gallery and the Exchange. A book to accompany the exhibition is published by Thames and Hudson. Supported by Arts Council England’s strategic touring fund

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Touring her latest exhibition, artist and activist Lola Flash talks through her exploration of the visual politics and preconceptions of gender, sexuality and race

• Lola Flash’s [sur]passing is at Autograph, London until 17 August

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British Columbia has doubled height limits allowed for timber towers – and countries around the world are following suit

British Columbia is no stranger to wooden giants. Along its western coast, Douglas fir and Sitka spruce trees topping 60 meters in height have in some cases weathered nearly a millennium of storms.

Now a growing chorus of architects, foresters and engineers want the province’s biggest city to grow another cluster of wooden giants: timber skyscrapers.

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The rapper and graffiti art legend is taking a ride through Florence and its masterpieces. He talks about their enlightened depictions of black people – and reveals who was the Renaissance Tupac

There’s something of the Renaissance man about Fred Brathwaite, AKA Fab 5 Freddy. A graffiti artist turned film-maker, producer and curator, Brathwaite spent much of the 80s speeding from downtown to uptown New York, connecting the punk scene with hip-hop DJs and graffiti crews like his Fabulous Five. He worked with everyone from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Nas, Blondie and the Clash. With his signature Kangol hat and oval shades, he became a torchbearer for hip-hop in the late 80s and early 90s, fronting MTV’s flagship rap show and conducting formative interviews with a fresh-faced Tupac and a typically spaced-out Tribe Called Quest.

Upgrading the Kangol for a fedora and the shades for thick-rimmed reading glasses, Brathwaite now has the calmly authoritative air of an elder statesman. So much so that he has moved into Alan Yentob territory, making a film for the BBC about the hidden representations of black figures in Italian Renaissance art, under the painfully alliterative title A Fresh Guide to Florence with Fab 5 Freddy. He even opens the show on horseback, trotting outside the Uffizi like a feudal lord. Where other hip-hop luminaries like Wu Tang Clan have their obsessions with shaolin kung fu, OutKast with aliens and MF Doom with comic-book villains, it seems Braithwaite’s cultural touchstones are rather more academic.

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A gallery of scenes from when the space age was young and extraterrestrial travel looked fun.

Marisa Merz, whose intimate art defies category but consistently challenges ideas of femininity in its fragile evocations of the body, has died at age ninety-three. The sculptor was the only woman artist

Distinguished architect who designed the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and One Canada Square in London

César Pelli will be remembered as a designer of world-beating skyscrapers, but for him the quality of his projects was more important than their height. The Argentinian-American architect, who has died aged 92, is best known for the towering landmarks he added to the skylines around the world: the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (formerly the world’s tallest building), One Canada Square in London, the World Financial Center in New York, the Torre de Cristal in Madrid, the Gran Torre Santiago in the Chilean capital, the International Finance Centre in Hong Kong, and the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.

Many of those structures are the among the tallest in their respective city or country, but Pelli preferred to judge his own work in more abstract terms: the emotional responses they generated, the clarity and economy of their designs, and their contribution to their cities as visual symbols, as spaces rather than objects. At the opening of One Canada Square, he quoted the Chinese philosopher Laozi: “The reality of a hollow object is in the void and not in the walls that define it.”

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I WAS FINISHING UP A ONE-MONTH STAY AT JOAN MITCHELL’S HOUSE in France when I met Joyce. It was July 1981, and Joan had awed me with tales of affairs with Giacometti and Beckett while dissecting my

After a week in which Norman Foster’s ‘Tulip’ tower planned for London was culled, a book on the aesthetics of ugly buildings is timely

Seared into architectural folk memory is the time in 1984 when Prince Charles went off piste at a dinner to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects and laid into what he saw as the “ugliness” of modern architecture. It became known as the Carbuncle Speech, predicated on his description of the winning proposal for the National Gallery extension as “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”. For its time, it was an unprecedented broadside and establishment sphincters duly clenched. The National Gallery hastily backtracked and ended up commissioning a lukewarm piece of postmodernism by the American partnership of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, while the architects of the carbuncle, Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, were stigmatised by royal disapproval and their practice suffered.

The carbuncle debacle marked a turning point in the relationship between the profession and the public. Seen, somewhat incredibly, as speaking for “ordinary people”, who were fed up with architects and their highfalutin ways, Prince Charles and his views were given further exposure through the fawning conduits of television programmes, books and his own magazine. A school of architecture was also established to disseminate the prince’s principles, and these ultimately coalesced in the form of Poundbury, the Dorset toytown that attempts to elide the modern world through its embrace of glutinous historical pastiche. Today, permanently cemented in the public mind with ugly architecture, the prince’s pustular epithet lives on, appropriated by the Carbuncle Cup, an annual jokey award for Britain’s worst building staged by the trade publication Building Design.

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Royal Academy of Arts, London
A retrospective of a Finnish national treasure celebrates a painter of great subtlety and a master of the self-portrait

It would be hard to think of a more overdue subject for a show than the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946). Of all the Nordic artists exhibited here of late – from Christian Købke and Vilhelm Hammershøi to Per Kirkeby and Olafur Eliasson – Schjerfbeck is undoubtedly the least known in Britain. This is mainly to do with the fact that almost all of her work remains in Finland, where it is greatly revered, but still the oversight seems inexplicable. For this is an art of peculiar beauty.

Quiet people in silent rooms, their thoughts very nearly withheld: that was her lifelong subject. A woman with eyes downcast, contained in her private emotions and the silvery glow of Schjerfbeck’s paint. A mother with her back turned to the viewer, the infant on her shoulder looking warily at us out of the shadows. A schoolgirl with thin pigtails and outsize shoes standing upright in her long black pinafore, a picture of obedience yet also shy courage, her spirit dignified by the painting.

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Aishwarya Arumbakkam’s Ka Dingiei series is inspired by the beliefs of an ancient Indian community

In the Indian state of Meghalaya – meaning “abode of the clouds” in Sanskrit – a small village sits near the border with Bangladesh. Lama Punji is home to 40 families from the Khasi indigenous ethnic group, whose use of the land and its resources is based on a traditional system of unwritten laws. But since 1998, the north-eastern region’s protected forests have been subject to large-scale destruction because of stone and sand mining. Unfavourable government policies, corporate might and legal loopholes have left the Khasi families powerless to resist the quarrying.

Photographer and film-maker Aishwarya Arumbakkam first visited Lama Punji in 2015 and has since been documenting the effect of mining on the village and its people in her ongoing series Ka Dingiei. Rather than taking a documentary approach, Arumbakkam’s lyrical and allegorical style is inspired by an ancient Khasi belief that nature is intrinsically linked to the divine, and destroying it could sever these ties.

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• Warren Kanders linked to military supplies firm Safariland
• Seven artists say participation in Whitney Biennial ‘untenable’

Seven artists have removed their work from the 2019 Whitney Biennial, citing the New York museum’s lack of response to calls for the resignation of a board member with ties to trade in law enforcement supplies.

Related: The big picture: 'Without photography, I wouldn't be here'

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The artists cited the museum’s “inertia” over calls to remove Warren B. Kanders.

There is a strict pecking order – PM gets first pick – but the director of this coveted collection tries to keep everybody happy

Deep in the basement of Parliament House, Justine van Mourik flits between racks of paintings, marble busts and giant colonial portraits.

Van Mourik’s attention jumps from one piece to the next in the vast art collection that she oversees for the Department of Parliamentary Services, each piece sparking its own story.

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Forensic Architecture is the https://www.artforum.com/news/artists-withdraw-from-whitney-biennial-as-backlash-builds-against-warren-kanders-80360 latest participant to pull their work from the Whitney

The Argentinian-American architect designed some of the world’s tallest buildings

The architect César Pelli, who designed some of the world’s tallest and best-known buildings, has died. He was 92.

Anibal Bellomio, a senior associate architect at Pelli’s studio in Connecticut, confirmed that the Argentinian-born American citizen died peacefully on Friday at his home in New Haven.

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An accidental photograph taken on a bridge began Adrian Skenderovic’s fascination with the boats on the Seine. Over four years, the Paris-based photographer has returned to the same spot more than 50 times to capture scenes on passing boats for his series Down the River. “Seeing human life from on top is like observing ants,” he says. “The bird’s-eye view gave me a distant perspective on human behaviour.” Skenderovic loves that there’s something for everyone on the Seine. “The bigger boats pack in the tourists, medium ones also host parties and weddings, then every now and again a yacht with Jacuzzi and champagne makes an appearance.”

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Surreal works from the home of François-Xavier Lalanne and his wife Claude expected to fetch up to £20m

For years, a giant brass and Sèvres porcelain grasshopper that could, if needed, double as a wine-cooler sat outside the royal apartments at Windsor Castle; a gift from French president Georges Pompidou to the Duke of Edinburgh during a state visit to France in 1972.

Across the Channel, an hour from Paris, the home of its late creator François-Xavier Lalanne and his artist wife Claude is full of such wonderful and whimsical creatures: a huge rhinoceros that transforms into a desk; a bronze cabbage on chicken legs; a herd of sheep that can be sat on, tables of enormous ginkgo leaves.

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Black Lives Matter protests, Tropical Storm Barry, demonstrations in Puerto Rico and the Tour de France – the last seven days, as captured by the world’s best photojournalists.

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The richly imagined story of an affair between Le Corbusier and Sri Lanka’s first modernist architect, Minnette de Silva

There’s an air of romance to nearly all the places Shiromi Pinto describes in Plastic Emotions, her novel about a love affair between two great 20th-century architects. Some of those places are tropical and alluring. In Sri Lanka, we head to Kandy with its verdant hills, and then Colombo with its chattering bourgeoisie. In India, Pinto takes us to Chandigarh and its elegantly experimental modernist buildings. Even in Paris and London, we are surrounded by the glamour of bohemians and their postwar parties. But it’s in the mildly prosaic confines of a conference in Bridgwater, Somerset, that the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier seems first to have collided with a Sri Lankan architect called Minnette de Silva.

It’s there that the illustrious Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne descended in 1947 for a conference. The delegates included the modernist architects Walter Gropius and Ernö Goldfinger. A photograph of the attendees shows Le Corbusier bespectacled and bow-tied at one end of the front row, and the young, bird-like De Silva in a sari, seated further along. If they seem an unlikely couple, a more candid photo seems to capture something of their mutual interest. They are mid-conversation: he is talking, smart hat perched on his head, a coat casually slung on his arm, while she clutches papers close to her chest, the tail of her sari wound over her hair in the traditional way. She gazes at him intently.

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For the sake of their collection, Trey and Jenny Laird had to crawl around to retrieve hundreds of pieces of a tabletop work upset by a pet.

Following novelist Ahdaf Soueif‘s https://www.artforum.com/news/citing-bp-sponsorship-and-other-issues-british-museum-trustee-resigns-80314 decision to step down from the board of the British Museum

I ARRIVE TO SEE BAR DYKES at the Flea just a few minutes before 7 PM on a Friday. I spot Becca Blackwell and their best friend Casey ambling toward the theater from an unremarkable Tribeca watering

Every single element in Eitan Ben Moshe’s exhibition “Thus Far” seems to be outside its natural habitat, but what that habitat is remains unclear. Entering the exhibition, visitors encounter a room

Communist Poland begot a golden era for experimental animation, with Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica winning international festivals in the 1960s and Zbigniew Rybczyński bagging an Oscar for Tango in

It looks like a space traveller and it’s just landed in Yorkshire. Huma Bhabha reveals how she sculpted her creation into life with cork and polystyrene

She has commanded the rooftop of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and has exported her distressed sculptures around the world, but only now is the UK waking up to the work of Huma Bhabha. It’s not the first time she has been late to the party. “It took me a long time to get any recognition at all,” says the artist, who was into her 40s before she made her first sale. “But, when you get recognition much later, you have a lot of time to do whatever the hell you want, which leads to a better understanding of what your work is.”

In the Yorkshire city of Wakefield, the destination for her first commissioned installation in the UK, shoppers seemed a little unsure what to make of the strange humanoid figure that is currently occupying of a stretch of pavement between the town hall and a first world war memorial. And it’s true that the two-tone bronze statue, commissioned as a centrepiece of the Yorkshire Sculpture International, looks oddly tentative, as if it has been beamed in from some intergalactic battlefield in an episode of Doctor Who and can’t quite believe where it has landed.

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Four artists-Korakrit Arunanondchai, Meriem Bennani, Nicole Eisenman, and Nicholas Galanin-have withdrawn from the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The reason given is the museum’s failure to address the concerns

My wife, Karen Welman, who has died of a heart attack aged 59 (fulfilling her often joked-about ambition to avoid reaching 60), was a designer and innovator with a formidable creative spirit and vision.

She started her design career at Michael Peters and Partners in London, and that was where, in 1984, I met, worked with and, ultimately, fell in love with her. Together we helped to establish the agency’s US office in New York in 1989; it was later to become Sterling Design, a new brand of design agency that Karen and I also helped to launch. She was a creative maverick who seemed to cause fun and mayhem with whatever she did – all in a beautiful, unique style that I called “predictably unpredictable”.

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Only what mutates can survive in curator Adwait Singh’s ecologically oriented three-person exhibition, titled after an amalgam of terrarium and mutare, the Latin word for the verb change. Priyanka

The following letter is addressed to Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta, curators of the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The signatories submitted it to Artforum for public release. Dear Ru and Jane, We

Signs and plaques honoring a donation from the family, which has been linked to the opioid crisis in the United States, were taken down or covered at the Paris museum.

Exclusive: Move follows Guardian report that social tenants were being banned from using facilities

Segregated play spaces are to be banned in all future London housing developments, the Greater London Authority (GLA) has revealed this week.

The policy, part of the London Plan for developers and local authorities across the city, follows outrage across the political spectrum at the case of the Lilian Baylis estate in Kennington. Guardian Cities reported that families living in the social housing side of the estate were not allowed to use the play area or any communal spaces on the development.

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The US documentarian has died aged 93. A member of the influential Photo League cooperative in New York, she believed that ‘photos could be used to effect change’. At a time when few women pursued a career in the industry, she worked on photo essays and film sets and was a regular contributor to Life

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This week in our Guardian Print Shop series we have an image shot by Sarah Lee on a hot day at London’s Southbank Centre in 2009

The Guardian photographer Sarah Lee captured this joyful scene at London’s Southbank Centre during a hot spell in August 2009. The temporary fountains bubbled low and then would shoot up high, leading to lots of squeals, she recalls. “The water formed a cage around the edge, which meant the two children in the foreground were only being sprayed; the kids in the centre, where the water was breaking, got soaked.” The abstract effect was deliberate: the spray, the jets, the silhouetted figures could be anywhere, says Lee, who was inspired by a 1930 picture by the photojournalist Martin Munkacsi: Boys Running Into the Surf at Lake Tanganyika. Lee likes to get close to her subjects which, in this case, led to a proper drenching.

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The dying hours of Pompeii, Leonardo’s life in drawings, a Bauhaus celebration and the best of the Edinburgh art festival – all in your weekly dispatch

David Batchelor
This fine artist of colour celebrates the centenary of the Bauhaus in his own idiosyncratic way.
• Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, 25 July to 25 August.

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“The Lion King” remake, the Apollo 11 anniversary and more: Here’s your guide to the weekend in culture.

The English graphic designer began to explore computer-led design in the early 80s

Blue Monday in 1983 was the first single to establish New Order as a force, after the death of Ian Curtis had ended the band’s previous incarnation as Joy Division. To match their new synth sound, Peter Saville created this groundbreaking sleeve.

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Bank of England, London
Counterfeit notes from Germany, a nuclear attack calculator and lots of bank bills … our economics editor invests in the Bank of England’s anniversary show

By its nature, the Bank of England is a sober and slightly forbidding institution. It sets interest rates, it polices the City to make sure there is no repeat of the 2008 financial meltdown, it is responsible for supplying banknotes, and it has tons of gold stashed away in the vaults. All, for centuries past, in as unobtrusive a way as possible. Before he became governor, Mervyn King once said that he wanted decisions over the cost of borrowing to be as boring as possible.

All of which is fine if you want to get on with things with minimum fuss. It is more of a challenge if you are trying to open yourself up and put on an exhibition highlighting the Bank’s many faces down the years.

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Science fiction illuminates reality by imagining the unreal in a mind-bending show at the Queens Museum.

Joseph Elmer Yoakum’s delirious vistas; Olga Balema’s discreet sculptures; and a 12-artist show, “Just Painting,” rich with visual echoes.

Around New York, all roads lead to the moon: Here’s a roundup of events honoring the small steps and giant leaps that made the mission possible.