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In Brooklyn, young artists reconsider a summer ritual, that is part celebration, part town-hall meeting.

Cherubic painting by the Welsh poet’s friend Augustus John has been acquired for £214,750

A portrait of a young Dylan Thomas, with red curly locks and a fresh, butter-wouldn’t-melt expression, has been acquired for the National Portrait Gallery.

The cherubic painting, by Thomas’s friend Augustus John, has been on long-term loan and permanent display at the gallery for 20 years.

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In a new exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art, a striking group of prints showcase some of America’s finest artists from the ‘Roaring Twenties’ right through to the second world war

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‘The children kept asking the attendant: Are the bears alive or dead?’

I have always been interested in childhood and play, that unguarded space of imagination and reverie that children access so easily. In the 1990s, I started thinking about how children were engaging with gaming and the internet, which were still embryonic. So when I moved back to Edinburgh from London, I set about exploring how digital learning was being used in schools.

The more time I spent in schools, the more I saw what children were actually doing. One of those things was museum visits – and it was clear that digital culture was greatly affecting museums too. So I spent a year trailing school parties taking guided tours around the Royal Museums of Scotland. I would secrete myself in a corner with my lights – this was in the days before cordless equipment – and shoot large groups quickly, then in post-production isolate single children. Here, you can see a split reflection of two girls in the vitrine, but only one of them actually looking.

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The selection marks the second time in a row that an African-American artist will represent the United States.

Zack Hatfield on Emmanuel Finkiel’s Memoir of War (2017)

Paintings by Bruce Kurland and new photographs by his daughter Justine Kurland; Jonas Mekas’s experimental work; and Kiki Smith’s art at the Museum at Eldridge Street.

Reclusive street artist did not know about show and says he would never charge to see his work

The street artist Banksy has disavowed any support for a popular exhibition of his work in Moscow, saying he would never charge people to see his art.

Moscow’s most controversial exhibition this summer has been an exhibition of Banksy’s graffiti works, including an original canvas of his Mona Lisa and 25 other original works that its organiser Alexander Nachkebiya had called “one of a kind”.

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NYT

Artforum / Coco Fusco

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Twenty-four sheds go head to head for the coveted title. The shortlist includes a floating shed pulled by hand from Liverpool to Leeds, a converted taxi, a war-era bar and a Viking Bauhutte

• You have until 28 August to vote for your favourite
  

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At 356.20 metres, Green Spine residential tower in Melbourne would eclipse Gold Coast’s Q1 building

Plans for Australia’s tallest building have been unveiled but the developer looks set to face a planning battle to secure its chosen design.

At 356.2 metres, the Green Spine residential tower at Southbank in Melbourne would eclipse the Gold Coast’s 322.5m-tall Q1 building.

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The great photographer captured thousands of unguarded moments in his New York studio, finding beauty in surprising places

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Cities are already up to 10C hotter than surrounding areas. As temperatures rise, here are four ways to cool cities down – saving both lives and energy

If you’ve felt uncomfortably hot in a city this summer, chances are it’s not just because of the weather. Look around any urban centre and you’ll see the built environment itself exacerbates summer temperatures.

Vehicles stuck in traffic emitting heat. Airconditioners pumping waste heat into the air. Concrete and asphalt across almost every surface, absorbing and radiating the sun’s rays. Urban canyons formed between tall buildings, trapping heat at the street level.

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The Telegraph

Stephanie Baptist, a photography agent, left New York to study abroad and came back with the seeds of a global dialogue on art.

The annual exhibition, which is part of Hobart’s Antarctica festival is back on with its chilly, majestic imagery. The winner this year is Sydney’s Sam Edmonds with his striking photo of a gentoo penguin in the snow. The show is currently being exhibited at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s Basement Bond Store Gallery.

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Wong Ping discusses his recent work

With its cavernous passageways, 200-metre trains and district-engulfing stations, Crossrail is a momentous architectural achievement. But will passengers just see a blur of beige?

A gaping white trumpet flares open at the bottom of the escalator at Liverpool Street station, ready to suck commuters into another dimension. The smooth concrete panels splay out to meet walls of faceted, enamelled steel, beneath a roof that zig-zags back and forth in angular waves, as if the whole space has been disturbed by whatever force lies beyond the great portal.

It is a fittingly momentous entrance, given that this dilated Anish Kapoor-style orifice leads to the parallel universe of Crossrail. Deep below the streets of London, the £15.4bn infrastructure project has burrowed out a world of vast streamlined passages and immensely long platforms lit by digital displays, promising to whisk you from the City to Paddington in 10 minutes, or to the towers of Canary Wharf in just six.

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Canada Choate on This Is Not This Heat at Pioneer Works

Competition aims to encourage a ‘more diverse view of what research and health means’

A new international photography prize for pictures that tell stories about health, medicine and science has been launched by the charitable foundation Wellcome.

It said the competition aimed to do for health what the Natural History Museum’s wildlife photographer of the year award had done for nature or the Prix Pictet prize had done for environmental and sustainability issues.

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The Art Newspaper

At the inaugural Front Triennial, powerful experiences come at a former station on the Underground Railroad and in drawings of gay life in Akron.

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After Disneyland, Venice Beach is the second largest tourist attraction in southern California and over a three-year period, photographer Dotan Saguy captured the artists, bodybuilders, musicians, vendors and homeless people who made up the diverse community. With gentrification creeping in, his work, documented in a book and an exhibition at the Venice Arts Gallery in Los Angeles, acts as a snapshot of a way of life that might fade away

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The artist says his mother was ‘difficult’, as Bath museum plans exhibition on early work

Grayson Perry, the Turner-prize winning artist, has spoken of the troubled relationship he had with his mother and her mental health problems.

The artist, 58, did not attend the funeral of his mother Jean Dines, who died a week short of her 80th birthday after suffering a stroke in 2016.

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Press Release

The New York Times

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Graves Gallery, Sheffield
From decapitated heads to squares smoking cigarettes, each of these fascinating portraits says something about what it means to exist

Portraiture is an enduring art form, thanks to the narcissistic tendencies of the human race. As far back as 28,000BC we were carving our image into rocks in Brazil, and this obsession with our own appearance has remained popular ever since: in 2017, 8.1 million visitors traipsed round the Louvre to stare at the lingering smile of the Mona Lisa, while every single day, social media is awash with selfies.

Which is why the aptly named Heads Roll at Graves Gallery, Sheffield – a show that focuses entirely on portraits and the depiction of the human form – is a mesmerising treasure trove. Curated by Sheffield-based artist Paul Morrison (best known for monochrome botanical paintings, prints and sculptures), the exhibition includes a dazzling array of portraiture spanning over 400 years and features 60 artists working across print, paint, sculpture and word art.

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Middle East Eye

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The Artnewspaper

The state of New South Wales is 100% in drought. Farmers are struggling with failing crops, low water supply and diminishing livestock feed. From ground level, the earth looks a brown dustbowl, but from the air it is transformed into an artwork of colour and texture. Photographer David Gray has captured the scenes using a drone

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His shocking shows – featuring births, enemas and vomiting – thrilled and appalled. Two decades after his death, why is the influence of this 80s nightclub legend still so pervasive?

He was painted naked and sprawling by Lucian Freud. He “gave birth” to his own wife on stage, using sausages as an umbilical cord. And he was the star turn in Taboo, perhaps the most debauched nightclub Britain has ever seen, hosting the revelry with his face painted blue, his nose and nipples pierced and his outfit as intimidatingly outlandish as possible. But there was much more to Leigh Bowery than sheer outrageousness – and his range, daring and influence are now starting to be appreciated by a new generation.

Perhaps the most prominent sign of this reappraisal comes from Australian choreographer Andy Howitt, who is bringing Sunshine Boy, a new show about the nightlife legend, to the Edinburgh fringe this summer. “I was at the National Gallery in Melbourne and there was a big sculpture that said, ‘By Leigh Bowery from Sunshine’,” he says. “I was like, ‘That can’t be the Leigh Bowery from the 80s dance scene.’ It sparked me on a journey to find out about the man.”

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A Unite the Right rally in Washington DC is outnumbered by opposing groups 12 months after Heather Heyer was killed by a white supremacist

Counterprotesters clash with far-right in Washington

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The story of bushranger Ned Kelly and his gang of outlaws has become the stuff of Australian legend, but nobody captured the essence of the story in a way that resonated with the public quite like modernist artist Sidney Nolan. In a series comprising more than two dozen paintings, Nolan depicted everything from the Kelly family’s domestic life to their violent run-ins with the police. Now, Nolan’s famous Ned Kelly series is showing at the Art Gallery of Western Australia for a short time. Curator Deborah Hart gave Guardian Australia a preview of some of the works

• Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series is showing at Art Gallery of Western Australia until 12 November

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In a city where power, gender and technology converge, artists ask hard questions about diversity.

Feilden Fowles is scooping up all the best work. Is this because their HQ is also a farm?

Lambs are bleating, pigs are snuffling and a chicken is wandering about between planters spilling over with tomatoes and courgettes. All this is just a short walk from the teetering towers of Southbank Place, where £10m apartments are rising in stacks behind the London Eye. But there’s a very different type of regeneration going on in this city farm, which sits on a sliver of land in Lambeth, between the tangled tracks of Waterloo station and the slabs of St Thomas’ hospital. Today the animals are going about their business while a group of young architects are toiling away in a low-slung studio shed at the other end of the site from a great wooden barn.

“The name Lambeth originally means ‘landing place for lambs’,” says architect Fergus Feilden. “So it’s sort of fitting that we’ve brought them back here.”

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The architects behind New York’s High Line have created a new urban space that reflects the diversity of Russia’s regional landscapes.

An evocative image of 1970s lads captured by Daniel Meadows during a documentary tour of the UK

In 1973, Daniel Meadows bought an old Leyland Titan double-decker bus for £360.20. He spent the next 14 months driving around Britain, covering 10,000 miles and stopping in 22 places, where he gave passing locals a print of themselves in return for having their portrait taken. The Daily Mirror ran a feature on Meadows and his bus entitled “The Great Ordinary Show”. The bus, he later said, “was my home, my travelling darkroom, my gallery”.

Meadows, as this group shot shows, was a master of the great ordinary. His main subject, he said later, was “the British people... just ordinary folk”. The works that constitute his now  classic documentary series The Bus are formal and monochrome, evincing the austere economic climate of early 1970s Britain, but also recalling a place where the idea of a working-class community still held sway.

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Inspired by the art of ikebana – a traditional style of Japanese flower arranging – Montreal-based artist Raku Inoue hand-crafts bugs using materials from his garden. He transforms his garden waste, including sticks, seeds and petals, to create his Natura Insects series. “I think about the main shape of the insect,” he says, “and try to find something to satisfy that. It’s very much like a puzzle.” As the year progresses, his creative options change. “I choose the materials according to what nature offers during that time. All four seasons offer many different materials to play with.” The series started as a morning routine over coffee to sharpen his thoughts for the day. “It was never meant to be a complex process, but rather an easygoing, morning mind-stretching exercise.”

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