News

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

No actually the first word emerged Deep in the bowels of the human throat & forged in loathing & envy, has now attained majority & like a Christ is rising, gagging, pointing to its second wound

Today, September 17, is the Feast Day of Hildegard von Bingen.

Solo exhibition at birthplace of Churchill displays images of what artist calls a broken England

Amid all the pomp, splendour and tradition at one of Britain’s most spectacular grand houses there is now noticeable division, despair and death.

There is the odd bluebird in the new paintings of Cecily Brown but less heading towards us with optimism and more being torn to shreds.

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New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum announced yesterday that it has laid off 24 employees, and that an additional eight have taken voluntary separation agreements. The cuts, which come just weeks

Footballers’ salaries | Balconies | Spiders | Male genitals | David Cameron

A long-established football club is wound up owing more than £500,000 (Wigan in danger of being wound up like Macclesfield, administrators warn, 16 September), on the same day that Spurs say they are confident about re-engaging the services of a player earning £600,000 a week (Tottenham close to re-signing Gareth Bale on loan from Real Madrid, 16 September). Funny old game.
Toby Wood
Peterborough, Cambridgeshire

• In the 1970s my mother was rehoused by her local council. She went to live on the 11th floor of a tower block in South Acton, west London. She was delighted to have a balcony (Room to breathe – how we entered the golden age of the balcony, 17 September). She immediately rigged up a washing line. “It saves on the electric bills,” she explained.
Lesley Matthews
Shipley, West Yorkshire

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South African photographer who covered the struggle against apartheid and won the trust of Nelson Mandela

The photographer Jürgen Schadeberg, who has died of a stroke aged 89, played a big role in covering the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and winning the trust and respect of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, while attracting the frequent attention of the security police. He also catalogued the emerging South African music scene, taking the earliest professional photos of the singer Miriam Makeba and the trumpeter Hugh Masekela.

As picture editor and chief photographer for Drum magazine, the leading South African publication reporting on black issues and figures, he covered many of the significant events in the country’s history, from the 1952 Defiance Campaign and the 1958 Treason Trial to the funerals following the Sharpeville massacre in which 69 protesters were killed in 1960. His photos of Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Trevor Huddleston and Ruth First became key portraits of the figures of resistance.

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Last month, the museum acquired works from 80 artists, often through discounted sales. A new letter signed by more than half of the artists asks for substantive changes in the Whitney’s policies.

From a kneeling slave at the Royal Exchange to the coffee house that was at the heart of the trade, a new tour is revealing a side of London that is often glossed over

Tucked down a narrow alleyway in the City of London, hidden in the medieval muddle of courts and backstreets, stands an ornate terracotta-fronted pub. Beneath a moulded frieze and a ye olde Dickensian lantern, a plaque declares that this was the site of London’s first coffee house, opened in 1652. The Jamaica Coffee House was founded by Pasqua Rosée, the Armenian servant of a coffee merchant, and frequented by the likes of Samuel Pepys. What the plaque fails to mention is that this little establishment was also at the very centre of the transatlantic slave trade.

“A huge amount of the City of London’s wealth came from slavery, but the connection is mostly invisible today,” says tour guide Ildiko Bita. To redress this situation, Bita and her group, Six in the City, have put together a revealing walk, titled Slavery and the City. Part of this weekend’s Open House festival, the walk unpicks the intimate connections between the City’s Lord Mayors, priests, financiers and the highly profitable atrocities of the slave trade. “Most walking tours tend to gloss over anything a bit difficult and end with funny anecdotes,” says Bita. “But this one is different. We’re going to look the uncomfortable aspects of the past squarely in the eye.”

The quaint backstreet pub, site of the former Jamaica Coffee House, is one of the many eye-opening stops on the route. Where usually a guide might regale you with stories of the birth of London’s coffee culture, or charming details about the facade, Bita paints a graphic picture of a place where sugar plantation owners would meet with slave ship captains to broker deals over the fate of hundreds of enslaved Africans, thousands of miles away.

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A new initiative between artists and museums aims to ensure Americans get their voices heard in time for the November election

With just weeks until an election, more than 60 artists have joined forced with some of America’s most prestigious museums and galleries for an urgent new social media project.

“It is the most important election at least in my lifetime,” said the project’s curator, Christine Messineo, who has teamed up with Vote.org to create Plan Your Vote, an initiative that will use artworks to send an important message.

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Christie’s is hoping to break records with its sale of the dinosaur, nicknamed Stan, which will be on public view through Oct. 21.

Exclusive: 150 jobs at risk as RA consults employees about need to reduce annual costs by £8m

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The Royal Academy of Arts is to consult staff on making 150 people redundant, a figure that equates to 40% of its workforce.

The RA on Thursday held a meeting for all staff members at which they were told of a need to reduce annual costs by £8m.

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Anonymous artist loses case against greeting card firm over use of Flower Thrower mural

Banksy’s trademark may be at risk after the street artist lost a case that an EU panel said was brought in bad faith and was undermined by a gift shop he set up in London last year.

Banksy lost the case against a greeting card company, Full Colour Black, which argued it should be able to use an image of the Flower Thrower stencil mural, which he painted in Jerusalem, because of the artist’s anonymity.

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Through lockdown, balconies went from an often forgotten outdoor cupboard to a joyful escape pod for millions. Now developers are catching up

Things were looking up for Sally Norman. Last October, she and her boyfriend, Jordan Parker, had saved enough to start renting their own place. They left their parents’ houses and moved into a little first-floor flat in New Maker Yards, a development of 850 flats in Salford.

Norman, who is 26, quit her job as a print manager in January to study interior design at Salford University, a dream she’d had for years. She got a part-time job as a sales assistant. “We absolutely loved the flat, and didn’t really notice the space,” she recalls. “We were out all the time and just came home to eat and sleep.”

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Architect, 91, tells Guardian the statues going up today are ‘fairly modest compared to the ones coming down’

As historic statues are torn down or questioned across America, Frank Gehry, one of the world’s leading architects, has declared an end to the age of bombastic “great man” monuments.

Related: Frank Gehry on his memorial to Eisenhower: ‘His accomplishments bring tears to my eyes’

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Guille and Belinda are two cousins who spent their summers dreaming of becoming famous singers – then love and motherhood arrived

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Actor and Wongutha-Yamatji man is first Indigenous artist to win any of the prizes in the Archibald’s 99-year history

• The finalists in pictures: David Marr, Magda Szubanski, Annabel Crabb and more

First-time Archibald prize entrant Meyne Wyatt has broken new ground to win the packing room prize for his self-portrait.

The Wongutha-Yamatji man is the first Indigenous artist to win any of the prizes on offer at the Archibald prize in its 99-year history.

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One of Australia’s most prominent art prizes, the $100,000 Archibald prize – which will be announced on 25 September – is awarded each year to the best portrait of a person ‘distinguished in art, letters, science or politics’ painted by an Australian resident. Gender parity has been a topic of interest in the past; among this year’s batch of 55 finalists (some of which feature more than one sitter), 36 sitters are male and 22 female. Of the 56 artists who painted them, 25 are women. Below is just a selection of this year’s finalists; you can view the full group at the Art Gallery of NSW website

• The Archibald prize finalists will be available to view at the Art Gallery of NSW from 26 September, along with the finalists of the Wynne and Sulman prizes

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In Deana Lawson’s largest institutional exhibition to date, the interior landscape of Black lives is once again rendered legible through the New York–born photographer’s signature air of fictive kinship.

“Sang Tu Erres,” the French title of Margaux Valengin’s show, translates as “Blood You Wander.” Phonetically, it sounds like sanctuaire, or “sanctuary”—but there’s no sense of refuge in Valengin’s

The museum announced Wednesday that 24 employees would be laid off and that eight others have taken voluntary separation agreements.

Wearable cookies, rooftop poets and life in the breakaway region of Abkhazia: Here are some of the Instagram accounts brightening our art critic’s daily feed.

David Zwirner has hired Kyla McMillan, former director of the now-closed Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, as director, Artnews reports. The blue-chip Zwirner is one of the largest galleries in the world; Gavin

Museums selling their art has long been frowned upon, but recent financial pressures have sent works to the auction block at Christie’s. The proceeds would pay for the care of the collection.

Maureen Paley, London
Wearing has abandoned the video art that won her the Turner prize and taken up watercolours and oils to create a soul-baring investigation of the human condition

A face wearing a mask over mouth and nose greets you as you enter Gillian Wearing’s exhibition Lockdown. It is like all the masked faces you pass at stations or in the supermarket, but the eyes are empty holes, and underneath the face covering is a second mask, lifelike and made of smooth latex. The outer mask is easy to remove: you take it off and feel like yourself again. It is a lot harder to remove the mask that is your face. But in the quiet and loneliness of lockdown earlier this year, Wearing set out to peel off all the layers and see herself inside herself, a woman without a mask.

This surreal sculpture is the only new work in this show that looks like a “Wearing”. The Turner prize winner is famous for videos and photographs. The first mask she strips off here is her official artistic identity as someone who works with a camera. She comes before us naked, as she might have looked in her first year at art school: not a famous conceptual artist, just a sincere nobody who likes to draw and paint.

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‘I wanted to make Manson look beautiful. But people found this image haunting and grotesque’

In the late 90s, Marilyn Manson was the new rock star in Los Angeles. I’d already gone on the road with him and shot a few covers, including the Smells Like Children EP, and done the press shots for his album Antichrist Superstar. So I felt like I’d earned the album cover of Mechanical Animals.

I always found it funny that people find the image haunting and grotesque. I wanted to make Manson look beautiful, like Bowie from the cover of Diamond Dogs. To make his prosthetic boobs, we drove out to the San Fernando Valley, where a Japanese special effects artist named Screaming Mad George had his studio. They brought in three different girls to get their breasts cast. In the end, the sculptor decided he’d rather make the prosthetic breasts from his imagination.

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In Karlheinz Weinberger’s photographs of sexy Swiss hooligans from the 1950s and ’60s, the line between innocent modeling and outright carnality can, strangely, become awfully fuzzy. These self-fashioned

Our critic chats about the beloved stretch from the music hall to Lincoln Center around Central Park with the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.

Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
Artists reinterpret the rules of soft-body dynamic computer technology to make a show which now casts new light on the Covid-19 era

If we have learned anything this year, it is that our bodies are soft. They are permeable, open to absorbing deadly viruses. Even Olympians have had to abandon their games in the face of Covid-19. And having followed the safety arrows, stood behind the line, covered my mouth, sat near a window, remained socially distanced, doused myself in sanitiser and coughed into my elbow (not persistently, just choking on errant biscuit crumbs), by the time I eventually arrive at Castlefield Gallery in Manchester, I am acutely aware of the vulnerability of my own body.

Despite being conceived in the good old days when no one had even uttered the word “coronavirus”, Soft Bodies – a mixed-media exhibition of 12 primarily UK-based artists – is right on time. Soft-body dynamics also refers to the field of computer-generated graphics concerned with simulating malleable materials such as muscle, fat, hair, vegetation and fabric. This was the original starting point for the exhibition, and participants were invited to recreate these squishy 3D objects on flat surfaces. The less said about this the better, since from Leonardo da Vinci to Hockney, artists have been reconfiguring the physical world in 2D, regardless of whether they used ink or computer-generated graphics.

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In The Inheritance, director Ephraim Asili presents a dramatic narrative based on his years in a West Philadelphia Black radical collective. The New York–based filmmaker’s first feature following a

“THE DANCE FLOOR is so much smaller than I remember.” This is the main feedback you’ll hear from visitors to the recently opened Boros x Berghain exhibition that fills Berlin’s old-power-plant-cum-legendary-nightclub

Sotheby’s hip-hop auction also raises $126,000 for a 12-inch copy of Rammellzee track Beat Bop, with artwork by Jean-Michel Basquiat

A plastic crown costing $6 worn by the Notorious BIG has sold for $594,750 (£461,000) at Sotheby’s first ever auction of hip-hop memorabilia.

The crown was used by photographer Barron Claiborne in portraits made three days before the rapper’s murder in a drive-by shooting, and is signed by the Notorious BIG. It features “one point broken off, some general light wear and abrasions”, according to the listing. The sale price was double the $200,000-300,000 estimate.

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Next Thursday is the first national day of arts in care homes, celebrating the contribution of creativity to enhancing residents’ quality of life. Here the National Activity Providers Association shares examples of residents’ artwork created during the pandemic

• ‘It helps residents stay healthy’: the benefits of arts in care homes

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The Swiss photographer was known for his celebrity portraits and black and white work – but a new exhibition explores his more colourful side too

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Stanley Whitney talks about his work on Artforum’s September 2020 cover, what No Prison Life really means, and the origins of his compositions.

David Zwirner is pleased to present new oil paintings by Suzan Frecon at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York, marking the artist’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery. Frecon