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Harry Smith, American artist, anthropologist and esoteric spiritualist, was an important figure in the beat generation. Remembered today for his experimental films and landmark six-album compilation Anthology of American Folk Music, Smith was also an avid collector, with interests ranging from the occult to Easter eggs. One of his obsessions was paper aeroplanes, which he mostly found on New York’s streets between 1961 and 1983.

Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith, edited by artist Andrew Lampert and archivist John Klacsmann (J&L Books and Anthology Film Archives), catalogues these creations. “As caretakers of Smith’s legacy we wanted to share these planes with committed fans. We also hope to introduce others to his work through these strange and beautiful objects that Smith imbued with meaning,” says Lampert.

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The heirs have argued that the work by Wassily Kandinsky was sold under duress by its Jewish owners after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands.

Museums in Texas, which has been devastated by recent storms and cold that overwhelmed its power grid and left thousands of residents without heat, power, or access to drinkable water, have resorted to

Severe temperatures in Texas, a swarm of locusts in Kenya, the first images of Mars from Nasa’s Perseverance rover, a blue dog in Russia and the enduring impact of Covid-19: the most striking images from around the world this week

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Join artist and associate professor of Performance Studies at New York University Malik Gaines in conversation with curators Naomi Beckwith and Massimiliano Gioni, and artists Theaster Gates and Julie

And at 86, the pioneering conceptual artist isn’t done yet. She’s getting her first retrospective ever, at the Brooklyn Museum.

The records of a Jewish community in Romania that was almost annihilated during the Holocaust are viewed as essential to reconstructing its history.

Architect renowned for his work on the Royal Festival Hall

The Royal Festival Hall, London, is an enduring legacy of the cultural optimism of the Festival of Britain, seven decades ago. In 1948, a hand-picked team of architects was brought in by London county council (LCC) to design the concert hall on the South Bank in which the festival would hold its main show. Among them were eight members selected by their former tutor, Peter Moro, at Regent Street Polytechnic, who, along with Leslie Martin, led the project. Trevor Dannatt, the last survivor of the group, has died aged 101.

Dannatt detailed the staircases and glazed screens of the foyers, along with some of the external windows and last-minute furnishings. He explained how each balustrade has a notch running up its centre for one’s thumb; how the main foyer stopped short of the riverfront for a double-height restaurant with its own spiral stair; that the columns on the main floor were lined in timber and how each element has a flash gap, creating a shadow that defined and separated it from the rest.

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Notre Dame | Dogs | Cats | Big mistakes | Royal award

A thousand ancient trees are to be felled to replace la forêt in the roof of Notre Dame (Report, 16 February). Why use pristine oak? No one will ever see these timbers. Surely this is an excellent opportunity to use glulam beams, which are stronger, highly sustainable, and do not require the felling of ancient trees. The cathedral’s original builders used the best and latest technologies. Why don’t we?
Robin Prior
Stroud, Gloucestershire

• There’s no need for a robotic dog if you’re not keen on picking up their waste (Mindfulness, laughter and robot dogs may relieve lockdown loneliness – study, 17 February). Just get yourself a dog like Dilyn, as I’ve never seen either of his owners swinging a full poo bag around.
Ian Grieve
Gordon Bennett, Llangollen canal

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Frida Kahlo is laid bare and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg saves bees, while Lindsey Mendick is one to watch – all in your weekly dispatch

Lindsey Mendick
You don’t know what to expect from this beguiling artist – it could be lovely ceramic sculpture of food or a violent installation about power and abuse. Mendick has talent and imagination to spare and is, as they say, one to watch. She will be in a show at Carl Freedman Gallery curated by Russell Tovey when lockdown ends – meanwhile the gallery website has a fine spread of her work.
• Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate

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From a treadmill and a puppy to 19th-century curtains, here are the purchases that have helped cheer people up in the past year

Not only has my new treadmill seen me through lockdown, it’s also keeping me on an even keel, as I live in a crowded area and don’t really enjoy running outside any more. I use it almost every day, along with an app called Zombies, run! or while listening to podcasts. It has become a comfort. The only downside is that I need to put it back under my bed after each use. Mar, journalist, Barcelona, Spain

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Few places have seen such turbocharged luxury development as Nine Elms on the London riverside. So why are prices tumbling, investors melting away and promises turning to dust? By Oliver Wainwright

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AS A CHILD IN JAMAICA, Queens, Milford Graves played on tin cans in the woods, “sending signals, trying to get everybody’s attention.” This spirit of adventure, showmanship, and defiance of convention

The scrapping of ambitious plans for the Centre for Music lays bare the place of the arts in austerity-torn Brexit Britain

There always was an artistic case for London to have a 21st-century concert hall. Both the Royal Festival Hall (built in the late 1940s) and the Barbican Hall (1960s-70s) have fundamental problems in matching the best halls in the world. London is – or was – one of the world’s cultural capitals. It could undoubtedly have made rich use of a better venue – a venue that was in the works until ambitious plans for the £288m Centre for Music were scrapped on Thursday.

In a perfect world – in which money was no object, the arts were more celebrated and politicians felt under pressure to treat cultural value seriously – the Centre for Music would have been a marked improvement. Simon Rattle’s 2017 appointment as head of the London Symphony Orchestra, based in the Barbican, gave the project a star power it otherwise lacked.

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An African-American studies professor suggests ways to mark the month, from David Driskell’s paintings and Dance Theater of Harlem’s streamed performances to the rollicking return of “Queen Sugar.”

With public art collections closed we are bringing the art to you, exploring highlights from across the country in partnership with Art UK. Today’s pick: Cambridge’s Stoneware Vase of Flowers by Jan Brueghel the Elder

There are tulips, roses, irises, forget-me-nots, daffodils and snake’s head fritillaries among the vast array of colourful flowers on display here. Their elongated stems overlap as if they are still growing and competing for prime place in the arrangement.

Nicknamed “Velvet” Brueghel for his ability to paint with enviable precision and delicacy, Jan Brueghel was one of the leading flower and landscape painters of his time. He was one of the sons of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the famous painter of peasant scenes who died when Jan was young. Jan and his siblings lived with their maternal grandmother, Mayken Verhulst, a watercolour artist who most likely taught her grandchildren to paint.

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In the aftermath of loss, Jason Bard Yarmosky sought refuge within an unusual 1950s home on the shore of Long Island — and found both respite and inspiration.

Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually and outdoors in New York City.

An urgent show at the New Museum — both a monument to a resilient culture and a memorial to what’s lost through racism — will surely rank as one of the most important of 2021.

“Magazines and the American Experience,” at the Grolier Club in Manhattan, explores the rich, colorful and sometimes deeply strange history of American periodicals.

Blickling Hall, a centuries-old building in England, is trying to protect its priceless tapestries, carpets and furniture with thousands and thousands of microscopic wasps.

Michael Phelan, founder of the two-year-old insider arts fair Marfa Invitational, is planning to open an arts foundation by that name in Marfa, Texas, this fall, the New York Times reports; the arts

“RUN ME OVER,” tremble the lips of a masochist to the woman who bullied him in high school. “Please . . . I want you to run me over with your car.” She doesn’t. Because only one thing sexually

Charles Venable, president of Newfields, the campus that is home to the Indiana Museum of Art, has resigned after an insensitive job posting by the institution on a recruiting site drew public outrage.

There’s something radical about the way the painter Reggie Burrows Hodges primes his blank white canvases with an inky, monochromatic black. He practically carves his figures out of this surface, layering

The Guardian’s picture editors bring you the best in news photography from across the globe

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Famed Bristol music fan Jeff Johns is staging a virtual exhibition of his paintings inspired by his love of live shows

At the outset of the first lockdown, Big Jeff developed a new habit. He would time his daily outing to coincide with a livestream gig, and as he walked through the empty streets of Bristol, he would watch the birds “reacting” to the music playing through his phone. One evening it would be the soothing folk rock of This Is the Kit, the next, Moor Mother’s confrontational spoken-word poetry. The type of music didn’t matter, as long as it was live. “If you can’t be at the show, that’s the next best thing,” he says.

If you’ve been to a gig or music festival over the past three decades, you may have noticed Big Jeff. Pre-pandemic, he would often fit several shows into one night, making him better known locally than many of the acts he goes to see. At six foot four, with his distinctive head of blond curls, Jeffrey Johns has become a figurehead for the UK’s independent music scene. “A one-man mosh pit with matching amounts of enthusiasm and festival wristbands” is how the Charlatans’ Tim Burgess describes him, referring to the strips of multicoloured fabric layered up Johns’s wrists (and sometimes embroidered on his jacket), a testament to a prolific gig-going career.

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Photographer Antonio Olmos takes his daily exercise along the 3km beachfront in Brighton and Hove documenting 423 of the beach huts

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As a survey of his work opens amid the snow of St Moritz, the artist talks about his obsession with blood, his disconnection from the art world, and why he misses banter with his army of assistants

If anyone should have been ready for this it was Damien Hirst. Thirty years before the pandemic that has made the modern world feel mortal, a young artist from Leeds was putting dead animals in glass tanks and arranging drugs in medicine cabinets to ram home the fragility of life.

Now Hirst is in lockdown like all of us, and as he chats via Zoom from what must be the least impressive room in his house, a small, spartan space with a blue and white cloth over a tiny window, he agrees that that early work suddenly feels very current.

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Robert Darch spent much of his 20s recovering from a stroke. His beautiful rural landscapes could be escapism … or something more sinister

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With public art collections closed we are bringing the art to you, exploring highlights and hidden gems from across the country in partnership with Art UK. Today’s pick: Blackburn’s Barbouyo by Rosa Bonheur

Rosa Bonheur was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1822. Her early education was disrupted – she was expelled from a number of schools – until her father, a landscape and portrait painter, intervened to begin formally training her as an artist. Her work was first exhibited in the Paris Salon when she was 19, at a time when women were often excluded from the art profession.

Barbouyo illustrates the skilled style of realism Bonheur was capable of and celebrated for. Finished in 1879, it is a similar piece to her earlier depiction of an otterhound Brizo, A Shepherd’s Dog, now in London’s Wallace Collection. She studied the anatomy and osteology of animals in abattoirs and in the École nationale vétérinaire d’Alfort in Paris. For her painting The Horse Fair (in the National Gallery), she was granted official police permission to wear men’s clothing, which allowed her to attend horse markets, sketching and studying the animals’ movements without drawing attention to herself.

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Iván Navarro: Planetarium January 30 – March 27, 2021 The City of Lights will be saturated with the radiant works of conceptual artist Iván Navarro as it hosts two new exhibitions, at Centquatre and

Artist Michael Stamm on devils, queerness, and his solo exhibition, “so super sorry sir!,” on view at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, through March 6. 

The body of the celebrated painter, best known for his Archibald Packing Room prize portrait of Bill Hunter, was found in western NSW this week

Australian painter Jason Benjamin has died at the age of 50.

The landscape artist and Archibald prize multi-finalist, who took out the Packing Room prize for his portrait of actor Bill Hunter in 2005, went missing from Carrathool in NSW’s western Riverina region over the weekend.

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The pact covers 22 full time and 145 part time staff who work in facilities, maintenance and art handling operations.

Artists in Myanmar are taking to the street to protest the army’s recent putsch in which it seized power from the government of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Since the February 1 coup, artists have marched in

His departure comes in the wake of a job posting, since corrected, that described the museum’s core audience as “white,” and amid criticism from a trustee, some staff and local artists.

Medrie MacPhee’s paintings; Jeanne Reynal’s mosaics; Angela Dufresne’s kinetic works; and Joaquín Orellana’s sonic sculptures.

The museum wrote that it was seeking a director who would work to maintain its “core, white art audience,” in addition to attracting a more diverse one.

The 28 most valuable works he and Jeanne-Claude collected and created were offered in a live auction on Wednesday; a timed online sale of another 347 lots will end on Thursday.

Among the homo triumvirate presently installed across Bortolami’s TriBeCa complex—which includes a presentation by Tom Burr and “Lucky For Men,” a group show curated by David Rimanelli—is an exhibition

Peruvian artist Teresa Burga, known for her involvement in the ’60s neo-avant-garde Grupo Arte Nuevo, died of Covid-19 on February 11 in Peru at eighty-five. Burga’s work in painting, sculpture,

Adenrele Sonariwo has brought her Nigerian sensibility to Melrose Avenue, with a show focusing on women.

Berlin-based conceptual artist Maria Eichhorn, whose work examines political, social, and economic systems, has been selected to represent Germany at the 2022 Venice Biennale. The selection was made by

AT A 2008 TATE MUSEUM TALK on Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn, Guy Brett recalled a studio visit during which Dittborn kept fussing with unwieldy canvases, growing frustrated. “Fucking rigidity,”

The founder of an insiders’ art fair in the Texas town is now planning a bigger cultural center, in the desert, for visitors year-round. It will open in the fall.

Local people disappointed as artwork of girl hula-hooping with bicycle tyre is bought for six-figure sum

A Banksy mural in Nottingham has been removed and sold to an Essex art gallery, disappointing local people who had hoped it would stay in the city.

The artwork showing a girl hula-hooping with a bicycle tyre appeared on the side of a building in Rothesay Avenue in October and was claimed by Banksy via his Instagram page.

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‘I wanted to pay homage to work that made my knees buckle. John looked nothing like Diane Arbus’s twins. But on set his spirit left and theirs came in’

Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with stage 4 throat cancer. The prognosis wasn’t 100% positive and there were days when I’d lay in bed wondering if I’d ever be able to shoot again. I’m self-taught, and I started thinking about the images that had changed the way I thought about photography – work by Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus, work that made my knees buckle with emotion.

I thought: if I ever get better, I would love to pay homage to these greats, in a way nobody has done before.

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Early on in Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 film Parasite, the mother of the wealthy Park family leads a prospective tutor on a tour of their luxurious and starchitect-designed estate, which, perhaps like every

Aldeburgh locals are complaining that Quartet (Sleeping) wouldn’t look out of place in Ann Summers. But it’s far from the first artwork to raise eyebrows

Name: Antony Gormley’s beach sculptures.

Age: 20.

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