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Art Basel launched today the inaugural edition of its https://www.artbasel.com/viewing-rooms Online Viewing Rooms , which features more than two thousand artworks presented by 231 galleries from

Writer, critic, translator, and former Artforum editor Jamey Gambrell, who introduced contemporary Russian writers Aleksandr Rodchenko, Vladimir Sorokin, and Tatyana Tolstaya to English-speaking audiences,

The Watkins College of Art in Nashville, Tennessee, announced in January a controversial  https://www.artforum.com/news/artistic-freedom-at-nashville-art-school-threatened-by-merger-with-christian-university-82087

The British designer’s new collection of furniture embraces the “rawness and primitive qualities” of small-scale models.

Italian architect, theorist, urban planner, and educator Vittorio Gregotti, known for designing opera houses, arenas, and other large-scale constructions and for transforming the Estadi Olímpic Lluís

Kay Rufai’s portraits of smiling black boys from south London came out of an initiative that investigated the lack of mental health provisions for black teenagers. The photographs will be on display at Brixton Village

• Photographs of black teenagers that stare prejudice in the face

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Carlos Pérez Siquier captured a changing Spain. Switching from poetic black and white to joyous colour, his pioneering work chronicles barrio life and the freedoms of the beach

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New York artist Arina Voronova has created a street art project aimed at promoting love and support at a difficult time

At a construction site on the Lower East Side, there’s a set of posters far different than the rest: they show photographs of people kissing while wearing surgical masks. Art in the age of Covid-19? Perhaps. But also a call for unity as the nation faces pressure living under the weight of pandemic.

Related: Plague visionaries: how Rembrandt, Titian and Caravaggio tackled pestilence

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Kay Rufai’s images of smiling 13-year-olds are one project confronting damaging stereotypes of black boys and men

• Smile-ing Boys Project – in pictures

In terms of challenging stereotypes and representations of black boys this was so powerful for me … because it’s not an image that you’re used to ever seeing, and you question why it has such an impact on you,” says Kay Rufai. He is talking about the 16 large-scale colour photographs of teenage boys that went on display at City Hall in London last autumn. They are distinctive in that each of the 13-year-olds is smiling, captured in moments of happiness, relaxation and vulnerability.

Related: 'They think I'm a gangster': the young black men caught in joblessness

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18 March 1898 The artist showed a feeling for the value of line and an ingenuity in devising striking patterns that were unusual in so young a man

The death is announced, at Mentone, of Mr Aubrey Beardsley, the young designer whose black and white work has gained so considerable a vogue during the last five years. He was born in 1874, educated at the Brighton Grammar School, and placed in an architect’s office at the age of fifteen. Disliking the profession, he left it in 1890 to become a clerk in a London insurance office, where he stayed a few years. Meanwhile he had begun to draw, and some of his designs, it is said, had gained the approval of Sir Edward Burne-Jones and M Puvis de Chavannes. He was, indeed, a disciple of the English painter, as the illustrations which he made for the Morte d’Arthur published by Messrs Dent in 1893 and 1894 showed plainly enough. In any case, the sometimes morbid originality of his work soon attracted attention, and he was able to devote himself entirely to design.

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From a film club on Twitter to Spotify playlists and a covers concert making its way through Instagram, creatives are finding ways to keep you entertained

What’s quarantine without a fun way to pass the time? As pandemic-induced social distancing pushes more and more people to the solitude of the home, self-isolators have started coming up with ways to entertain themselves, their neighbours and strangers around the world through social media.

Related: Coronaviral: the best memes, tweets and cartoons to get you through – open thread

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With most spaces shuttered, art galleries are getting creative about presenting work online. Here are two great shows viewable from home.

Students are protesting the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Hong Kong’s decision to close in June. The school has been conducting online classes since February due to the coronavirus, but gave

German artist Wolf Kahn, whose controlled, atmospheric oil and pastel landscapes fused realism and Color Field painting, has died at the age of ninety-two. In addition to his seventy-year painting

The Museums Association (MA), a United Kingdom–based advocacy organization that represents more than 1,500 museums, is asking the government to establish an emergency fund for cultural institutions

Bill Stern, a curator and avid collector whose fascination with California pottery led him to found the Museum of California Design, has died at age seventy-eight at his home in Los Angeles. The many

Artists, actors, dancers and authors search for a silver lining as openings are disrupted by the virus outbreak.

Broadway, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Opera are among the institutions that have closed their doors and suspended their programs.

A journey through lesser-known artisan villages of Michoacán reveals the ever-changing nature of their tradition.

While sitting in a tramcar on my way to the exhibition venue, I noticed a curious ad for Florence Jung’s solo exhibition: “If there is one name you never utter, call 0775050362.” The intrigue continued

After canceling its fair, Art Basel Hong Kong will present more than 2,000 works online with an estimated value of $270 million. That’s just the beginning as the art world goes virtual.

The Museum of Nebraska Art (MoNA) has appointed Nicole Herden as its new executive director. Herden heads to the institution, which is affiliated with the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), from

Artadia has announced the recipients of the sixth annual Los Angeles Artadia Awards: Beatriz Cortez, Amir H. Fallah, and Suné Woods. Cortez, a Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist, whose work

Much of Europe’s greatest art is haunted by outbreaks – but amid the death are testimonies of love. Can these masterpieces guide us through today’s crisis?

• Coronavirus and culture – a list of major cancellations
• Coronavirus – latest updates
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It seems incredible that we should find common cause with the people of 500 years ago, who faced disease without any understanding or remotely adequate treatment. But on Sunday, Pope Francis walked the streets of Rome, left empty by coronavirus, to visit the church of San Marcello on the Corso – and revere a cross that supposedly protected Rome from plague in 1522.

We now find ourselves in the same plight – menaced by an illness that seems to have the upper hand and that is turning our assumptions upside down. Even the methods being used, including quarantine, come from that plagued past. As does much of Europe’s greatest art. These masterpieces might console us, or make us see this unfamiliar moment in a new light, or even give us practical ideas to cope. Here are some of those images, perhaps to be used as guides – for Rembrandt, Titian and Caravaggio trod this path before us.

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As theatres and museums close around the UK, industry bodies say lack of outright ban on visiting venues leaves them unable to claim on insurance

• Coronavirus and culture – a list of major cancellations
• Coronavirus – latest updates
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Leading UK arts figures have called for greater clarity from the government regarding compensation as the coronavirus causes theatres and museums around the country to shut down and Tate closes its doors for the first time in 120 years.

In a statement, the actor and director Samuel West, who is the chair of the National Campaign for the Arts, said that in its briefing on Monday evening the government had advised people to stay away from theatres and concert halls “but did not instruct those public spaces to close. The NCA is concerned that UK cultural organisations will therefore be unable to claim compensation for loss of earned income.”

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The United Kingdom has stood apart from Europe and the United States in its response to the coronavirus—as of Friday the British government had not restricted the daily life of its residents or imposed

Caramel Curves – a women’s motorbike club – is just one of the highlights of Death Magick Abundance, a photobook by Akasha Rabut about the cultures of New Orleans

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Scotland’s hills are enjoying the best snow conditions for years. Photographer Murdo MacLeod hits the piste

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With works like Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium, he combined a respect for older traditions with bold expressions of the new. He had contracted the coronavirus in his native Italy.

TO PARAPHRASE X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene: “Oh Anxiety, Up Yours!” Although some readers believe I’m an early-’80s punk, I’m actually eighty-one years old, and find myself in an increasingly dismaying

For Laura Langer’s first institutional solo show, the Argentinian artist fine-tunes semiotic equivalences. In her large-scale painting Trumpet (all works cited, 2019), the circular opening of the wind

Abused, dishonoured and forgotten, the great artist’s terrible luck continues – her National Gallery exhibition is the latest cultural victim of Covid-19

• Coronavirus and culture – a list of major cancellations

Four centuries is a long time to wait for justice, but Artemisia Gentileschi hasn’t got it yet. What a cruel joke that, after being assaulted and dishonoured in her lifetime, forgotten for centuries, then slighted by art snobs who affect to prefer her father Orazio, the greatest, most revolutionary woman artist before modern times has now become a cultural victim of the coronavirus. The National Gallery in London has postponed its exhibition Artemisia. It had no choice, with works due to come from locked-down Italy and loans from America facing global air paralysis.

This is a tragedy for anyone who likes to see a wrong righted. Artemisia should be a household name – and this exhibition promised to make her just that. As long ago as last summer, I met with its visionary curator Letizia Treves to find out what she planned to include. I was thrilled.

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Following a series of breakout shows in recent years, Leda Bourgogne’s most recent outing, curated by Cathrin Mayer, reads like an early-career retrospective. Astute viewers are likely to pick up on

The ZJS Ndimande photo studio was founded in Greytown, in what is now KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa, in 1940. Many of the portraits taken at the studio between 1964-1983 show people posing against a dark curtain backdrop, often holding simple props. An archive of photographs during the period offers a different perspective on township life during apartheid and forms part of Bonhams’ modern and contemporary African art sale on Wednesday 18 March

• Photo archive of life in apartheid-era South Africa to be auctioned

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Two silent films frame Kevin Jerome Everson’s newest exhibition here. They feature a character, Derek Whitfield, ironing . . . and ironing. He never speaks, nor does he look out at the camera. The lens

Ed Fisher, my partner, who has died aged 79, was an artist and illustrator who, though he never made much money from his work, continued to draw and paint throughout his life. Friends treasured his detailed images of houses and trees, and his finely-drawn Christmas cards. More recently his work reached a wider audience when together we produced five books, including Folk Tales for Bold Girls (2019) and North Wales Folk Tales for Children (2016), which I wrote and he illustrated.

Four generations of artists preceded Ed in his family; his grandfather, Josh Fisher, made a living as a landscape artist. Ed was born in Wallasey, on Merseyside, to George Fisher, who owned an electrical fitting business in Liverpool, and his wife, Thelma (nee Edwards). When Ed was an infant the family were evacuated to North Wales during the second world war and afterwards settled in the village of Llanfairfechan, where his mother turned their home into a guest house and his father pursued an artistic career about as financially unsuccessful as Ed’s was to be later.

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The Guardian’s picture editors select photo highlights from around the world

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A lock of Elvis’s hair, the skull of Pablo Escobar’s hippo, a stuffed ‘swoose’ … if it’s macabre, Wynd collects it. Our writer takes a trip into his absinthe-fuelled world

It was with no small degree of scepticism that I recently journeyed to the lodgings of a Viktor Wynd Esquire in the East End of London. It had been relayed to my editor, on what I deemed to be dubious authority, that Wynd was the keeper of rare and exotic beasts, and that his basement dwellings contained examples not just of two-headed lambs and mummified fairies but also of erotica so unseemly it could redden the eyes of anyone who glanced upon it. It had furthermore been rumoured, in less salubrious quarters, that Wynd was a purveyor of hallucinatory liquors in his upstairs bar – and would dispense them to paying punters alongside small packets of miniature anuses sculpted from Belgian chocolate.

This Wynd character, it seemed likely to me, would prove to be nothing more than a charlatan – if indeed he existed at all. But after relaying such doubts to my editor, I was displeased to find him still keen on ushering me out the door on a blustery March morning to investigate further.

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Collection of 1,000 rare studio images reveals a different side of people living in townships

A rare studio photo archive that shines a light on the undimmed spirit of township life in apartheid-era South Africa is to be auctioned in London.

Related: Portraits from apartheid-era South Africa - in pictures

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My mother, Jill Theis, who has died aged 90, was a Liberal, then Lib Dem councillor, who cared deeply about her community in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, and was instrumental in restoring one of its architectural landmarks.

Born Julia Mason in St Leonards-on-Sea, she was the daughter of Maurice Mason, an eye surgeon in Hastings, and his wife, Henrietta (“Gottie”) (nee Kennedy Jones). Jill attended Roedean school in Brighton. As a teenager during the second world war she would sit on the cliffs overlooking the Channel, watching bombers fly over.

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South Sudan is the last place on the planet where food is airdropped, and in Mogok there was little other choice. Without tonnes of grains and cereals, many people would have perished. Photographer Tony Karumba followed the aid consignment from loading at the airport in the capital, Juba, to distribution in Ayod county

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In Lebanon, an artist teams up with the spirit of Julius Caesar to preserve history.

From Celia Paul to Dora Maar to the abstract expressionists in postwar New York, Annalena McAfee on the female artists finding their way into the limelight

“Why are there no great women artists?” asked the American art historian Linda Nochlin in a landmark essay in 1971.

Her essay was a provocative response to the art history canon, which gave women a couple of passing sentences in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and one nod (to Käthe Kollwitz) in Gombrich’s magisterial Story of Art. “There existed not a single reliable general study to which one could turn,” Nochlin later wrote.

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Gregotti helped design stadium for Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and created the Marassi stadium for 1990 Football World Cup

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Vittorio Gregotti, an Italian architect who helped design the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics stadium, has died aged 92 after catching the coronavirus, Italian media said.

Gregotti died of pneumonia on Sunday after being hospitalised in Milan, having fallen ill with Covid-19, the Corriere della Sera newspaper and AGI news agency reported.

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Police appeal for information after burglars snatch three ‘important cultural artefacts’

Three high-value paintings have been stolen in a burglary at Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford, police said. Thames Valley police said burglars had broken into the gallery on St Aldates, which is part of Oxford University’s Christ Church college, at around 11pm on Saturday. Nobody was injured during the heist, police confirmed.

They took Salvator Rosa’s A Rocky Coast, With Soldiers Studying a Plan, from the late 1640s, Anthony Van Dyck’s A Soldier on Horseback, circa 1616, and Annibale Carracci’s A Boy Drinking, circa 1580.

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In his new book, Africa State of Mind, Ekow Eshun celebrates contemporary African photography. Here he showcases the work of artists looking at the self and sexuality, from Zanele Muholi to Eric Gyamfi

In August 2009, an exhibition titled Innovative Women opened in Johannesburg, aiming to showcase the work of the city’s young black female artists. The launch was attended by Lulu Xingwana, minister for arts and culture at the time, who had been invited to officially open the show. But instead of giving a speech, Xingwana stormed out of the gallery after seeing images by the photographer Zanele Muholi that depicted naked women in close embrace. Muholi’s work, said the minister, was immoral, offensive and ran contrary to “social cohesion and nation-building”. South Africa has one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, with discrimination on the basis of sexuality barred by law. Yet censorious attitudes such as Xingwana’s towards homosexuality are widespread. Almost three-quarters of the population believe same-sex sexual activity is morally wrong, according to a 2016 survey. Similarly intolerant views are commonplace across Africa. Homosexuality is outlawed in 32 of the continent’s 54 nations. It is punishable by life imprisonment in Uganda, Tanzania and Sierra Leone. In Sudan, southern Somalia, Somaliland, Mauritania and northern Nigeria, the penalty is death. Against that backdrop the work of a photographer such as Muholi takes on a dual role, both representing individual artistic expression and operating as a form of political activism; a means to positively assert LGBTQ+ identity in straitened circumstances.

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For millions of lives, the novel coronavirus currently rocking the globe has induced a secession from “real” to virtual space, where ubiquitous “social distancing” mandates are simultaneously heeded

Wherever you are in the world, this week we’d like to see your pictures on the theme ‘detailed’

The next theme for our weekly photography assignment, published in print in the Observer New Review is ‘detailed’.

Share your photos of what detailed means to you – and tell us about your image in the description box.

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Tate Modern, London
This big new show stints on Warhol’s art, in all its variations, in favour of identity politics and the artist’s celebrity-filled world

Andy Warhol would be 92 this summer, had he not died of post-operative complications in 1987. His soup cans are almost 60, their whites now fading to grey. Few enough people dine daily on Campbell’s soup, as he did, for these paintings to sustain their significance as demotic homages any more. The common soup for the common man is recognisable these days mainly as blue chip Warhol.

Tate Modern, in considering how to present the artist for a new generation, has eliminated almost everything that lacks the split-second familiarity that mattered so much to Warhol. His output as a portraitist, for instance, is generously edited. Instead of the dubious sitters – from German industrialists to the Shah of Iran – whose faces he (or his assistants) depicted by production-line rote, we are given only the immortals – Elvis, Marilyn, Jackie – or those still-living stars whose fame survives in our time. Debbie Harry in violet and turquoise, lime and sulphur colour-ways; Mick Jagger in 1975, with the wrong-shaped head and hairdo, in tarry dun and Elastoplast pink, his youthful beauty squandered. There are, after all, good and bad Warhols.

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