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An exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York documents a brief moment when rogue videographers shot an influential sliver of the music scene.

Photographer Kathryn Martin started working with wildflowers when she lived in London. Inspired by the copperplate engravings in 18th-century botanist William Curtis’s eight-volume Flora Londinensis, she digitally photographs native wildflowers against graph paper. The idea developed when she moved to the South Downs and collected flowers on her daily walks as a way to connect with the landscape. The resultant exhibition – called Come, See Real Flowers of this Painful World, after a haiku by Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō – is on show at London design shop Egg. “Wildflower habitats are in sharp decline, but are a vital source of food and shelter for countless species,” Martin says. “I want my photographs to show how beautiful these plants are, to encourage people to notice them, and perhaps even sow their own patch.”

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The artist’s estate, a company that licensed the sale of some of his works and a former caretaker had been fighting in court since the time of the artist’s death in 2018.

Following the forced departure, announced May 27, of Gwangju Biennale Foundation president Sunjung Kim, the foundation is facing questions from both city and state. The Gwangju Ministry of Culture,

The new building, once a Safeway grocery store, is just around the corner from the museum’s current home in Santa Fe, N.M., and is about 47,000 square feet bigger.

The aftermath of the conflict in Gaza and Israel; the crisis in Ethiopia’s Tigray region; the 77th anniversary of D-day and the election in Peru: the most striking images from around the world this week

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“THIS IS IMPROVISATION,” Butch Morris says emphatically to an ensemble during a heated rehearsal. He continues, “This is collective improvisation. This is Conduction. This is conducted improvisation.

Problematic sections of a work painted on Tate Britain’s walls have caught museum officials between the demands of activists and the policies of the British government.

Readers respond to suggestions that prolific letter contributors should be commemorated with statues

There are other metrics for measuring letter writing success. I may not have had as many letters published as the Big Four (Letters, 8 June), but I bet none of them have had a letter published in the Review and illustrated by cartoonist Tom Gauld. No statue required.
Maggie Johnston
St Albans, Hertfordshire

• Jeanette Hamilton asks: “Do women make no epistolary contributions to the Guardian?” I do try, but I don’t need a statue: featuring on the fourth plinth in Antony Gormley’s One and Other was quite enough.
Margaret Squires
St Andrews, Fife

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Dale Harding’s solo exhibition “Through a Lens of Visitation” attempts to piece together his matrilineal heritage by juxtaposing intricate quilted pieces by his mother, Kate Harding, with a selection

A feverish appraisal of our fast-food culture takes in grotesque sitcoms, erotic body-horror – and a bubblegum-chewing witch getting spanked

New York, 1986: artists Gretchen Bender and Cindy Sherman record a conversation. Bender had just edited the video for Megadeth’s Peace Sells and Sherman asks about videos she’s making with manipulated television footage – does she want to change TV itself? “I think of the media as a cannibalistic river,” Bender replies, describing a rapid flow that picks up, appropriates and repackages everything in its path. “There is no consciousness or mind. It’s about absorbing and converting.”

The following year Bender showed Total Recall – 24 stacked TVs and three projection screens, broadcasting choreographed video edited at a pulse-raising pace. The mash-up of ads, war footage, idents, movie clips and abstract animation is set to an intense electronic score. Total Recall broadcasts the acceleration of contemporary life, an attention-deficit TV culture of rolling news and channel surfing.

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Ever since the enigmatic Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino died in 1973, leaving behind a secret residence in Turin, wildly improbable speculations concerning the apartment’s “true” purpose

This summer the world’s largest showcase of female and non-binary art comes to Britain. Its curator describes her mission to reclaim the art world from tech bros

In 2019, the most recent iteration of the Every Woman Biennial drew 3,000 attendees to two galleries in New York and Los Angeles. Among the 600 artists represented were a 12-year-old trans photographer of moths and butterflies and a 91-year-old multimedia artist who makes paper assemblages.

“That was ultimately the show of my dreams,” says C Finley, who founded the world’s largest biennial of women and non-binary artists. She is confident about the forthcoming inaugural London leg: “This show is the thirst trap of London – it will scratch an itch people didn’t even know they had.”

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Hirst’s macabre dead-fly art, Claudia Andujar’s Yanomami photographs and Jimmy Robert’s history of the Caribbean – all in your weekly dispatch

Damien Hirst: Relics and Fly Paintings
The latest exhibition in Hirst’s year-long occupation of this space sees him at his most macabre and death-obsessed, from black paintings made with dead flies to a flayed statue of Saint Bartholomew.
• Gagosian Britannia Street, London, until end of 2021.

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Time Decorated: The Musical Influences of Jean-Michel Basquiat explores the artist’s relationship to music in three short films

Before Jean-Michel Basquiat became one of the leading art stars of the 1980s, he was a kid from Brooklyn thriving in the music and art scenes of downtown New York in the late 1970s.

“Everyone was coexisting together, musicians and artists,” says Ed Patuto, the producer of Time Decorated: The Musical Influences of Jean-Michel Basquiat, three short films that explore the artist’s relationship to bebop, no wave, and hip-hop. “You would go to a gallery, see a show, end up at [legendary East Village club] the Pyramid. Moving between platforms and genres was what people did.”

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WHEN THE ARTIST Judith Godwin died on May 29 in her ninety-second year, the art world lost the last living member of a generation of women Abstract Expressionists, a group of artists largely overlooked

The Bibienas, the focus of an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, dominated Baroque theatrical design.

Individual absorption is the order of the day at two touring spectacles devoted to the painter’s greatest hits.

A recipient of his field’s highest award, he was known for his Brutalist designs, of churches in particular, in a postwar Germany trying to rebuild itself.

The tile, installed beneath a mural sponsored by the Detroit Institute of Arts and intended to honor police officers, contained imagery that some associate with a rebuke of racial justice.

Objects designed for birth, fertility and parenthood have long been neglected by institutions. A new book and exhibition series aims to change that.

New York’s longest running alternative art space celebrates its own near-mythic history — as well as the twists and turns of the city’s cultural scene.

Her acclaimed modernist but naturalist designs recognized the fragility of the climate and the social effects of parks and playgrounds.

The organizers of Shanghai’s Art021 and Beijing’s JingArt have announced plans to launch a new art and design fair in Shenzhen this fall, The Art Newspaper reports. Shenzhen DnA (Design and Art) will

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will return a pair of Benin bronzes to Nigeria, becoming the latest major institution to do so and likely compelling others to do the same. The two sixteenth-century

Cornwall art installation created from 20,000 pieces of discarded tech highlights growing threat it poses to environment

The seven giant faces loom above the dunes, gazing sombrely over swathes of bright sea thrift towards the ocean.

Even before the G7 had sat down to begin their Cornish summit, Mount Recyclemore, a sculpture made of discarded electronic waste depicting the visages of the seven leaders, looked bound to be one of the stars of the show.

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

The New York Times asked photography students at the Bronx Documentary Center to show us how they see themselves.

Cecilia Alemani, who will lead next year’s art extravaganza, wants a Biennale that grabs attention beyond the opening-week parties.

From peashooting women to British troops in drag, Kent photographer John Topham captured his country from the 1920s through to the end of the second world war

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A look back at the career of Senegal-born film director Ousmane Sembène as his 1968 film Mandabi is released in the UK for the first time

•Mandabi is released on 11 June in cinemas, and on 28 June on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital platforms.

•Peter Bradshaw on Mandabi: classic about colonialism resonates today

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Gagosian is pleased to present “Field of the Cloth of Gold,” an exhibition featuring four monumental new paintings by Anselm Kiefer. The tension between beauty and terror, alongside the inextricable

The Nitsch Foundation is the official representative of Hermann Nitsch and supports activities which foster the exploration and presentation of the artist and his Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork), the

As temperatures plummeted to zero in parts of NSW – bringing snow to the state’s south-east – photographer Mike Bowers ventured out to capture the wintry wonderland

• Wild weather: cold front wreaks havoc on Victoria and brings snow to swathes of NSW

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The museum, which has some 160 items from Benin City, becomes the latest institution to announce the restitution of some of the priceless artifacts.

Megagallery Hauser & Wirth has announced that it is opening a new space in a repurposed vintage-car showroom on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. Comprising 5,000 square feet of exhibition space

Hannah Drake’s (Un)Known Project in Louisville is both a memorial to enslaved people whose stories will never be uncovered, and a challenge to unearth narratives hidden in attics and archives.

He helped reinvigorate the Metropolitan and made its exhibitions into crowd-pleasing spectacles, providing a model for other fine-art museums across the country.

Amanda Williams’s ‘Embodied Sensations’ at MoMA; Matthew Wong’s ink drawings; and installations by Cameron Rowland take on policing.

Donald Judd’s Architecture Office in Marfa, Texas, has been gutted by a blaze of undetermined origin that burned steadily for twelve hours beginning just after midnight on June 4. The two-story brick

“The Milk of Dreams” has been revealed as the title of the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale, to be held in 2022. The name—which was announced today by the event’s artistic director and chief curator Cecilia

Reopening after a tumultuous year, this Lower East Side institution is addressing the omissions and erasures in the neighborhood’s history — and its own.

‘When I first visited the Yanomami tribe, they were completely isolated – they hadn’t seen a camera and didn’t know what photography was’

It was 1971 when I photographed the Yanomami tribe of Brazil for the first time. I knew that it would take time to build our relationship, but I wanted to see if we could become friends. For me, the best photographers are those who are truly interested in their subjects.

The Yanomami is a big population of indigenous people who live in the Amazon rainforest in northern Brazil and southern Venezuela; several thousand live in Brazil alone. A small village can be as few as 40 people, or a big one as many as 200. When I first went to the Yanomami villages, the tribe was completely isolated – some still are today. At that time, 50 years ago, they hadn’t seen a camera and didn’t even know what photography was.

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The German artist’s new exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris examines, with bitter humor, how digital technology shapes life offline.

THE SUPERRICH WANT, and can have, luscious gardens of their own. We know the gardens of Versailles, the chateau overlooking them representative of the extreme indulgences of the aristocracy that

National Museum Cardiff

Six artists take us from the post-colonial Caribbean to rural India, but Meiro Koizumi’s unflinching telling of Japanese atrocities in China will be seared in the memory

Artes Mundi 9 is, like its predecessors, a complex affair. With a £40,000 prize to be announced on 17 June, the much delayed and postponed exhibition of six shortlisted artists is a bumpy ride. Spread over Cardiff’s National Museum Cardiff, Chapter and g39 (where some screenings will take place later this summer), it always strives for some sort of social or political relevance. We go from hundreds of drawings of the sea to the atrocities of the Japanese occupation of China, from the post-colonial Caribbean to the Covid pandemic, from coal mining and farming in rural India to the sacred, the surreal, the disaster zone and racial injustice.

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Le pillage d’œuvres d’art par Napoléon préfigure les excès des Français en Afrique un siècle plus tard. Le rapatriement ultérieur de certaines d’entre elles sert désormais de modèle aux musées contemporains.

His art seizures paved the way for similar French excesses in Africa a century later. Yet the return of some treasures after his defeat set a model for museums today.

Whether designing a condominium in Miami Beach or a museum in Abu Dhabi, Mr. Nouvel draws inspiration from what flows in and around the landscape.

English Heritage’s six portraits range from a Roman emperor to Queen Victoria’s goddaughter

Six paintings that tell fascinating, not widely known stories of people from the African diaspora in England’s history, including the Roman emperor who strengthened Hadrian’s Wall and Queen Victoria’s goddaughter, have been unveiled by English Heritage.

The heritage body commissioned six artists to paint portraits, putting them on display at forts, abbeys, historic houses and barracks where they have an association.

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