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THROUGHOUT SRI LANKA’S ART HISTORY, the people have been the keepers of knowledge. In place of national institutions and collections, artists, collectors, scholars, and gallerists have acted as repositories

Frieze, the media and events company which runs an eponymous magazine as well as four international art fairs—Frieze London, Frieze Masters, Frieze New York, and Frieze Los Angeles—announced today that

Today, the extraction of both narratives and material resources is deeply intertwined with a seemingly indefatigable drive toward technological development. In the Danish artist Anne Haaning’s multimedia

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has gifted the Dance Theater of Harlem (DTH) with $4 million, which, coupled with a matching grant of $1 million from the dance organization’s board of directors, brings

He’s been targeted by George Christensen and accused of advocating terrorism, but the Perth-born artist just wants to provoke critical thinking

As an artist, Abdul Abdullah wears his humour on his sleeve, but also on his skin. His tattoo of the Southern Cross encircles an Islamic crescent moon and star, and he got it for the purpose of Them and Us, his photographic self-portrait that won the 2011 Blake prize for human justice. In his 2013 work, Self-Portrait as an Ultra-nationalist, he wears a “Fuck off we’re full” T-shirt and an Australian flag. The same year, he made It Doesn’t Matter How I Feel, in which he’s painted black except for his hands, one of which is held in a thumbs-up, the other extending the middle finger. I could go on.

“I’m a seventh-generation Australian and I’ve got the Australian sensibility of relentlessly giving people shit,” he says innocently.

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Joshua Helmer was removed at the Erie Art Museum after a New York Times article about complaints during his tenure at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

American conceptual artist who cremated all his paintings in 1970 and later effaced the images of public figures with stick-on dots

A recent episode of The Simpsons saw America’s favourite dysfunctional cartoon family take a step back in time. In one scene, the young Marge Simpson, a reporter on the Springfield Shopper, interviews a local conceptual artist about his change of subject from mouths to noses. “So,” rasps Marge, “you’ve moved into painting giant schnozzes.” “Marge,” the artist replies, “the mouth has had its day. It’s time to find out what the nose knows.” The artist in question, who voiced his cartoon character himself, was John Baldessari, who has died aged 88.

Unusually for a conceptual artist, the maker of the (real) series titled Noses & Ears, Etc. (2006), was known for his sense of humour. His Wrong series (1966-68), of intentionally faulty snapshots – one showed a palm tree apparently sprouting from the artist’s head – each incorporated (and broke) a rule from a photographic manual.

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Despite the perils, Afghan artists have consistently portrayed their country and its many facets.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) will distribute $30.9 million to 188 humanities projects in forty-five states and the District of Columbia as part of its latest grant cycle. NEH chairman

My friend Jak Kilby, who has died aged 72, was a freelance photographer who documented the early years of the free jazz and free improvisation scene in London with great diligence and empathy. Following his mid-life conversion to the Muslim faith and his adoption of the name Muhsin, his camera was also trained on the Islamic world: its buildings, its people, its struggle.

Born to Leslie Kilby, a bus driver who later worked as a manager in a TV company, and Dorothy (nee Gossett), John (Jak) was educated at Malory school in Lewisham, south London. By the late 1960s he was a familiar figure at the Little Theatre Club in Covent Garden and at other places, where young musicians were developing a new musical language.

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The National Gallery of Canada announced today that the Vancouver and Los Angeles–based artist Stan Douglas will represent Canada at the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale. Known for his installations, films,

The artist on the Oklahoma roots of his new show, that $52.5 million painting, and meeting Walt Disney.

Want to get inside the US president’s head? Callum Morton’s ‘very confronting’ public artwork offers that peculiar pleasure

What’s inside Donald Trump’s head?

In a sculptural depiction of the US president’s head by the Australian artist Callum Morton, which popped up in Ballarat on Wednesday, not much.

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The photographer talks us through Family Car Trouble, his new book documenting ‘the arrival of children, the departure of a father – and the maintenance of a difficult 1993 Volvo 940 Turbo station wagon.’

Warning: this article includes a graphic image some readers may find disturbing

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High-tech smart cities promise efficiency by monitoring everything from bins to bridges. But what if we ditched the data and embraced ancient technology instead?

Guardian Cities is concluding with ‘The case for ...”, a series of opinion pieces exploring options for radical urban change. Read our editor’s farewell here

Ever since smartphones hooked us with their limitless possibilities and dopamine hits, mayors and city bureaucrats can’t get enough of the notion of smart-washing their cities. It makes them sound dynamic and attractive to business. What’s not to love about whizzkids streamlining your responsibilities for running services, optimising efficiency and keeping citizens safe into a bunch of fun apps?

There’s no concrete definition of a smart city, but high-tech versions promise to use cameras and sensors to monitor everyone and everything, from bins to bridges, and use the resulting data to help the city run smoothly. One high-profile proposal by Google’s sister company, Sidewalk Labs, to give 12 acres of Toronto a smart makeover is facing a massive backlash. In September, an independent report called the plans “frustratingly abstract”; in turn US tech investor Roger McNamee warned Google can’t be trusted with such data, calling the project “surveillance capitalism”.

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British artist to show new work exploring ‘nation in turmoil’ at Churchill’s birthplace

Paintings of a broken, divided, dystopian England are to go on display at one of the nation’s most magnificent stately homes, where Sir Winston Churchill was born.

Blenheim Art Foundation announced on Wednesday that Cecily Brown, a member of the YBA generation (Young British Artists) of the early 1990s, would be the next contemporary artist to present work at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.

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Almost half of the artists currently featured in MoMA PS1’s exhibition “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011” have signed an open letter urging New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and PS1

Cornelia Parker makes art about gravity: how to elude it, how we cannot. In many of the installations, sculptures, and films surveyed here, the English artist emphasizes a fragmented, paralyzed sense

Performance Space New York has entered a major new partnership with the Keith Haring Foundation, which has awarded the organization a $1 million grant in support of the creation of a new two-year

FRONT International, the Cleveland triennial for contemporary art, has announced details of its 2021 edition, which will take place across three cities in northeast Ohio from July 17 through October 2,

Jesper Just distorts rituals of movement through video and performance—two media he pairs in perverse combinations to destabilize museum architecture and to create plangent moving images that echo with

He’s injected pasta with drugs and let goats loose in a gallery. Now Darren Bader is putting food on plinths and asking visitors to turn it into tasty salad. We try to find out why

Before answering my questions about Fruits, Vegetables; Fruit and Vegetable Salad – his new exhibition opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art – New York-based artist Darren Bader says that he has a specific (read: irreverent) style and he hopes it’s not too much of an annoyance. I tell him it’s not an annoyance at all and start with an easy one: Where do you get your ideas? “Oh, you know, the magical world of ideas,” he replies.

His exhibition, which takes place on the eighth floor of the Whitney, comprises a previously untitled work that the museum acquired in 2015 but has never displayed until now. When viewers emerge from the lift on the eighth floor, they will discover a cornucopia of fresh fruit and vegetables, each variety presented as a sculpture on its own wooden plinth. Four times a week, museum staff will collect the ripened fruit and vegetables and – according to Bader’s instructions – make a salad. The slicing and dicing will be captured on film and projected in the empty gallery, after which the salad will be served to viewers. Staff will then replenish the plinths with fresh produce, and so the process will continue.

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A four-story, 40,000-square-foot space will bring the photography center’s exhibition and education spaces together under the same roof.

The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, has named the eighty-seven artists who will receive fellowships for the organization’s upcoming winter and spring residency program. Seventy-six

How did a church in a quiet Sussex borough end up with an astonishing, hand-painted copy of the world’s most famous ceiling? Deacon Gary Bevans talks us through his creation

The Sistine Chapel is easy to find. Just follow the A259 through Goring-by-Sea until you see the low, spireless red brick English Martyrs Church. Enter this Catholic place of worship – and look up.Above the simple wooden pews, laid out in bold yellows, greens, pinks and blues, you can see God dividing the land and waters, making the sun and Earth, reaching out a powerful finger to spark life into Adam.

It’s Michelangelo’s masterpiece all right, superbly replicated by the Sussex church’s deacon, Gary Bevans. Created between 1987 and 1993, his achievement seems all the more remarkable now that digital reproductions of the original are having a bit of a moment. HBO’s The Young Pope and its follow-up The New Pope both use hi-tech digital copies, as does Netflix’s The Two Popes. Yet Bevans’ version is hand-painted. That makes it a human story – and a human masterpiece.

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The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced that the Los Angeles­–based philanthropists Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle have made a “transformative” gift that will allow the institution to

Philosopher, writer and political thinker with controversial views on education, hunting and architecture

Roger Scruton, who has died of lung cancer aged 75, was a philosopher and a controversial public intellectual. Active in the fields of aesthetics, art, music, political philosophy and architecture, both inside and outside the academic world, he dedicated himself to nurturing beauty, “re-enchanting the world” and giving intellectual rigour to conservatism.

He wrote more than 50 books, including perceptive works on Spinoza, Kant, Wittgenstein and the history of philosophy, and four novels, as well as columns on wine, hunting and current affairs, and was a talented pianist and composer.

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Despite the Polish government’s efforts to recover cultural objects lost during World War II, researchers say its museums hold stolen items left behind by the Nazis.

The latest of a Guardian Print Shop series featuring classic sports images from the likes of Gerry Cranham, Mark Leech and Tom Jenkins – yours to own for just £55 including free delivery

Olga Korbut’s performance on the uneven bars at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, pictured here by Gerry Cranham, was a thing of beauty. The 30-second display featured what became known as the “Korbut flip” – an inconceivable, whirling sequence in which she daringly backflipped off the high bar, then propelled herself backwards off the low bar via her hips. It was so innovative that when the judges scored her routine 9.80 out of 10, placing her second overall, there were howls of disapproval from the crowd. They believed the 17-year-old Soviet gymnast, the darling of the Games, should have become the first to score a perfect 10 at the Olympics. Instead, that honour went to the great Nadia Comaneci four years later. Korbut did at least claim gold medals in three other disciplines at the Games, though her flip was later outlawed for being too dangerous.

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The renowned architect, known for his work on the World Trade Center site and Berlin’s Jewish Museum, was inspired by an unconventional honeymoon

In the summer of 1969, for our honeymoon, my wife Nina and I rented a car and went on a strange adventure around the United States to see the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright. We didn’t know how to drive, so we got together with two other young men, a Jehovah’s Witness and a very religious Swedish Lutheran. Since we were too poor to stay in hotels, we slept mostly in the station wagon, Nina and I on a plastic inflatable mattress in the back and the two men in the front. How she stayed married to me, I don’t know.

The trip was supported by a fellowship from the Cooper Union, my architecture school in New York, and it was entirely focused on Wright’s buildings. From New York, we took a Greyhound bus down to St Louis, to the Mississippi. Then we drove all over the country before ending up at a design conference in Aspen. Nina at that time was too young to have even a glass of wine, so in the evening, as we talked about the buildings we had seen, she would be drinking Coca-Cola. I remember it as a very strange initiation, both to marriage and architecture. Fortunately, she is such a wonderful person and didn’t think I was crazy.

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In 1960, the photographer was sent to the UK to shoot a country and a people emerging from postwar austerity into a new era. He perfectly captured the customs and traditions often overlooked by the British themselves

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After a https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/arts/design/joshua-helmer-philadelphia-museum-art-erie-art-museum.html New York Times investigation into workplace complaints made against Joshua Helmer,

Organizers of the China Independent Film Festival (CIFF), one of the longest-running film events in China, have decided to suspend operations “indefinitely” due to growing concerns over censorship,

Following a https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/arts/design/joshua-helmer-philadelphia-museum-art-erie-art-museum.html New York Times investigation into workplace complaints made against Joshua Helmer,

The 2019 Singapore Biennale announced that participating artist Amanda Heng was named the twelfth recipient of the Benesse Prize. Established in 2016 and presented by Benesse Holdings, Inc. in collaboration

In an ambitious, multi-disciplinary exhibition, a range of artists from Cindy Sherman to Nan Goldin, are aiming to dismantle stigma and raise funds

A week into 2020, and the US political discourse on reproductive rights is already at a crossroads. On 6 January, 39 Republican senators signed an amicus brief urging the supreme court to reconsider Roe v Wade, the 1973 supreme court case that secured the legal right to an abortion. This comes on the heels of a year in which Alabama’s governor, Kay Ivey, signed into law the Human Life Protection Act, stating that doctors who perform abortions can be sentenced to life in prison. On 15 May, the day the law was signed, Jasmine Wahi, co-founder and director of Newark-based arts not-for-profit Project for Empty Space, texted artist, activist and fellow SVA MFA instructor Marilyn Minter. “We have to do something,” she wrote. Within minutes, Minter responded that she was game.

Related: ‘People were afraid of me’: the artist who turned her breasts into a cinema

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Five years after masked gunmen stormed the offices of the French weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing twelve people, including a police officer, the French Ministry of Culture revealed that

Ilana Harris-Babou and Mateo Nava have been named the recipients of the National YoungArts Foundation’s 2020 Jorge M. Pérez Award. The $25,000 prize, which is funded by the Jorge M. Pérez Family

The construction industry is wasteful and creates huge CO2 emissions. But what if new buildings had to be adapted and resused or built only with materials already available?

Guardian Cities is concluding with ‘The case for ...”, a series of opinion pieces exploring options for radical urban change. Read our editor’s farewell here

The wrecking ball has always been the great symbol of urban progress, going hand in hand with dynamite and dust clouds as the politicians’ favourite way of showing they are getting things done. But what if we stopping knocking things down? What if every existing building had to be preserved, adapted and reused, and new buildings could only use what materials were already available? Could we continue to make and remake our cities out of what is already there?

We might have no choice, given the way our voracious urban consumption habits are going. In the UK, the construction industry accounts for 60% of all materials used, while creating a third of all waste and generating 45% of all CO2 emissions in the process. It is a greedy, profligate and polluting monster, gobbling up resources and spitting out the remains in intractable lumps. On our current course, we are set to triple material extraction in 30 years, and triple waste production by 2100. If we stand any chance of averting climate catastrophe, we must start with buildings – and stop conceiving them in the same way we have for centuries.

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The artist talks about his project spaces in London and Nigeria, and Africa’s untapped artistic potential

Over the past decade, I’ve been running a project space for emerging artists in east London called Guest Projects. Based just off Broadway Market, it supports practitioners in a variety of disciplines, from visual artists to musicians to theatre companies. Not long after setting it up in 2008, I decided I wanted to make the project international. As I have roots in Nigeria, and the creative scene there is so exciting, Nigeria seemed like the right place to do it.

About eight years ago, I acquired some land in Lagos. Now we’re in the process of building a residency in Lekki, a rapidly developing area in the east of the city. It will house three artists at a time, with studio and gallery spaces on the ground floor, and residents’ bedrooms above.

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Nadav Kander is one of the most influential photographers in the world, and a new book – The Meeting, published by Steidl – documents hundreds of his portraits taken over three decades. His subjects are unpredictable, from global celebrities to London market traders and South African schoolchildren

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From a rocket tower and a pasha’s palace to a beachside bungalow and a geometric masterpiece

“Arcosanti is Paolo Soleri’s built prototype for his vision of the city of the future. Masterplanned as an eventual community of 5,000, it has housed acolytes who came to learn Soleri’s construction techniques and help make cast bells, which were sold to finance the project. It is a magical environment, ‘hippy modernism’ with domes and carvings and rooftops looking out on to the Sonoran desert just north of Phoenix.”

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Thousands of unseen photographs depicting the building of modern Britain are being released to the public for the first time. Historic England is publishing more than 2,000 newly digitised images online from the John Laing Photographic Collection. Laing was one of the UK’s biggest construction companies, whose projects included Coventry Cathedral, Berkeley nuclear power plant, London Central Mosque, the M1 motorway and the second Severn Bridge

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A sense of crisis is pushing through the art scene, and some of Australia’s most exciting artists are smashing apart artistic convention

A sense of urgency is pervading Australian art. Artists are seeking more than ever to spark cultural change. For some, this involves moving away from traditional art-making approaches. Others continue to mine the archives or the natural world for materials that inspire, shock, or lend themselves to 21st century recalibration.

Collaborations are becoming more common across disciplines, between artists and scientists, activists, healthcare workers, educators. Audiences and art institutions are being asked to play new roles in their relationship with art.

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“His courses built for tournaments are hard,” Tiger Woods once said, “ but there’s a good reason for everything.”

A derelict house tunnelled beneath by its former owner was the artist’s dream come true. Could architect David Adjaye help her transform it?

Just inside the artist Sue Webster’s front door, crafted from grey cardboard, is the architect’s model of her house. On top is a pyramid roof that Webster lifts up. “This bit we haven’t done yet,” she confesses. “We’d been building for five years: I needed the project to stop.” Tucked under the roof on the top floor of the model is a set of keys that belonged to the previous owner. On the cheap plastic key fob is the name “Lyttle”.

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Products that reuse materials and support local communities can both do good and look good

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Fusing landscape, art and architecture, Manrique embraced the island’s rugged volcanic terrain as a canvas to create works that are stunning a new generation of art lovers and tourists

A sea of gnarled black lava spills in through the window of a white cubic house on the island of Lanzarote, tumbling in contorted waves on to the polished concrete floor. A pair of chubby cacti cling to the rocky windowsill, as if swept indoors by the churning torrent of molten basalt outside. It looks as if the building might have been swamped by a volcanic eruption, but this is no natural disaster. It is the work of César Manrique, the celebrated artist-architect of Lanzarote. Harnessing lava formations as other designers use concrete and steel, he conjured spectacular spaces from the caves, bubbles and tunnels left by the primal movements of molten magma.

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Estorick Collection, London
The lifelong Italian futurist shared his peers’ obsession with planes and fast cars. But, as this riveting first UK show reveals, his radiant, humane paintings set him apart

The Italian painter Tullio Crali ought not to be quite such a head-on revelation. After all, his astonishing vision of a solo pilot nose-diving straight into a canyon of skyscrapers, light shattering round his helmeted head, is one of the great masterpieces of futurist art. Yet this riveting survey at the Estorick Collection comes as a surprise from first to last, and not only because it is his first in Britain.

Crali (1910-2000) is a strange case, in life as in art. He grew up in Zadar, on what is now the Croatian coast, but which once belonged to Italy. His family moved to north-eastern Italy in 1922, and it was there, at the age of 15, that he created his first futurist work after reading an article about the movement.

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Bruce Davidson’s photograph of a child pushing a pram in a mining village captures a moment of peace amid the noise and grime

When he was serving in the US Signal Corps in 1956, the celebrated photographer Bruce Davidson was posted to Paris. He served there under a sergeant who was Welsh. Davidson was due three days’ leave and he asked the sergeant where on earth he would send his own worst enemy. The sergeant replied without hesitation “Cwmcarn”, a mining village in the Ebbw Valley. On that first visit, Davidson underestimated how long it would take to get to Cwmcarn and had to leave before he could take any pictures, to avoid being awol. But in a couple of hours, he was able to take in a sense of “the coal dust and the flesh, of the sweat and the danger” of the miners’ lives. “There was something beautiful about a life that was so horrible,” he has said.

It was another nine years before Davidson returned to Cwmcarn, by which time he had become famous for his revolutionary images of American subcultures and gangs, and for his indelible up-close images from the frontlines of the civil rights movement. He hadn’t forgotten Cwmcarn, however, and finding himself in Wales on a magazine assignment to photograph Caernarfon Castle, he made his way back there.

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