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A contemporary art museum joined Italy’s inoculation drive last week, a way of healing the soul and the mind along with the body, its director said.

A rare exhibition, at a museum in Switzerland, brings together works that, despite sharing a common cultural tradition, come from different worlds.

Deana Lawson’s regal, loving, unburdened photographs imagine a world in which Black people are free from the distortions of history.

‘We didn’t know which kit he’d show up wearing – so we painted one part of the parking lot blue and another red’

It all stemmed from a German sports drink. I’d done some advertising work for a brand called Isostar and they’d had this idea where you take a tennis player, put them on a red clay court and shoot them serving from above to capture the shadow. I thought, that is one hell of an idea, but I need the right vehicle to really do it justice.

Shortly afterwards Sports Illustrated called asking me to go and shoot Michael Jordan for them. I thought – well, there’s the vehicle! We’d never met but I knew he’d be perfect for it.

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In the pandemic, nightclubs have been turned into exhibition spaces, switching the craze for museums evoking clubs. It’s throwing fresh perspective on what dancing is even for

The ttttssshhhhhh of a smoke machine breaks the silence as a red spotlight blinks to life, illuminating social distancing markers on a dancefloor polished smooth by the shuffling of feet. The soundsystem kicks into gear with an anthem by techno star Dave Clarke. But the DJ booth is empty, and the only ravers here are the ones frozen in time, trapped behind glass as photo displays.

This is Echoing Through Eternity, the pop-up museum exhibit currently showing at Fuse, a venue in the hip Marolles district of Brussels that has been serving its community for the last 100 years, first as a cinema and then a Latin discotheque before emerging as one of Belgium’s best techno clubs. The exhibition features slick posters, wacky flyers (rubber gloves, fake driving licences) and colourful photos from the club’s storied past. Most of the material has come from its own archive, but there are personal items here too, submitted by the club’s devoted community after an open call on social media. Starting with its LGBTQ roots, the exhibit winds through the main dancefloor, with a stop off at the DJ booth, and ends in a three-minute club simulation upstairs.

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Christopher Marinello has spent three decades finding missing masterpieces, recovering half a billion dollars’ worth of art. He talks about threats from mobsters, tricky negotiations – and bungling thieves

One summer morning in 2008, Christopher Marinello was waiting on 72nd Street in Manhattan, New York. The traffic was busy, but after a few minutes he saw what he was waiting for: a gold Mercedes with blacked-out windows drew near. As it pulled up to the kerb, a man in the passenger seat held a large bin-liner out of the window. “Here you go,” he said. Marinello took the bag and the car sped off. Inside was a rolled-up painting by the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux, Le Rendez-vous d’Ephèse. Its estimated worth was $6m, and at that point it had been missing for 40 years.

Marinello is one of a handful of people who track down stolen masterpieces for a living. Operating in the grey area between wealthy collectors, private investigators, and high-value thieves, he has spent three decades going after lost works by the likes of Warhol, Picasso and Van Gogh. In that time, he says he has recovered art worth more than half a billion dollars. When I call him, he answers, then abruptly hangs up. “I was just on my way to a police station to recover a stolen sculpture,” he explains later, apologising.

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Frank van der Salm has spent 25 years turning the way we see urban surfaces upside down – from twinkling nightscapes to eerie, empty interiors

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More than 300 objects relating to emperor are being sold by French auction house Osenat, marking the 200th anniversary of his death

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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: Massys’s An Old Woman in the National Gallery, London

This is one of the most arresting faces in the National Gallery’s collection. A protruding forehead, eyes set deep in their sockets, a pushed-up nose, wide nostrils, a hairy mole, a toothless mouth, a rumpled neck: the unmistakable features of the old woman known as “the Ugly Duchess” defy every conventional canon of beauty.

Related: Solved: mystery of The Ugly Duchess - and the Da Vinci connection

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A family gets an athletic retreat on Long Island that is just this side of camp.

This year’s Nikon surf photo of the year award goes to Stu Gibson for his shot Free Fall, featuring surfer Tyler Hollmer Cross taking on Shipsterns in south-east Tasmania. The winner has been selected by a panel of 13 high-profile judges from within the surfing world, including the seven-time world surfing champion Stephanie Gilmore

• Isabella Nichols escapes after leg rope traps WSL surfer underwater

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Facing up to six years in prison on charges of distributing pornography over the internet, Russian artist and LGBTQ activist Yulia Tsvetkova declared a hunger strike beginning May 1, The Art Newspaper

Pronounced ‘hotter’ and featuring a rooftop bar called the Exhibitionist, the gallery leans into the region’s breezy character – but its ambitions are serious

Contemporary artist Ali Bezer believes in a version of the Gold Coast that doesn’t appear on postcards. Her home town, she says, is more complex than its glossy facade suggests.

Bezer’s newest installation, an undulating aluminium and bitumen sculpture called I Can Hear Water (2021), will show as part of Solid Gold: Artists from Paradise, the inaugural exhibition of a new $60.5m gallery that opens to the public on 8 May, part of cultural district Home of the Arts.

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Japan has altered its tax laws to encourage galleries and fairs to expand into the country, and is seeking other paths to becoming competitive in the global art market, Nikkei Asia reports. The effort

At this year’s iteration of the renowned art fair, artists and institutions are highlighting the importance of art that helps toward social change

When Sarah Elizabeth Lewis stepped onstage for her Ted Talk in 2017, little did she know how much she would help bridge the gap between art and social policy.

“How do images alter our sense of justice?” she asked.

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In two North Philadelphia neighborhoods, many hands create homegrown art tributes to local heroes.

Twentieth Century Society praises ‘fantasy structure’ as it highlights top 10 properties in danger

A space age-like leisure centre that inspired Liam Gallagher to name his band Oasis, instead of The Rain, has been placed on a top 10 list of 20th-century British buildings most at risk.

Oasis leisure centre in Swindon is on a list published every two years by the Twentieth Century Society, highlighting threats to more recent architectural heritage. Top of the list is Coventry’s Bull Yard shopping precinct, while other buildings include City Hall in London and Swansea civic centre.

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When David Kelley, the founder of the global firm IDEO, downsized in Northern California, he still found room for the ultimate studio.

Versatility is not the only reason blobby sofas and chairs are back in style.

New titles offer insight into some often-overlooked creators and creations in England, Austria, Japan and the United States.

The artist’s tapestries capture moments of her domestic life. They begin at her kitchen table.

Ontario is now the centre of the outbreak in Canada, led by more virulent variants. The latest surge in the number of cases was so big that authorities this week despatched the military and the Red Cross to help care for critical patients

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Over five years, Gavan Goulder explored Britons’ fascination with Elvis Presley – photographing fans and portrayals of the singer in the media. Now the images are collected in a book, Thank God for Elvis

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Tim Van Laere Gallery is pleased to present its second solo exhibition of Friedrich Kunath, titled New Ballads. The universe of Friedrich Kunath is carefully balanced around dichotomies. His paintings

Featuring thirty-six artists from different generations, A FIRE IN MY BELLY is an exhibition about violence and how experiences of violence are negotiated and transformed through gestures of rage,

The year has been bumpy for this Los Angeles museum, with Covid-19, questions about diversity and a leadership reorganization. But its director, Klaus Biesenbach, says, “every day is a chance to improve.”

After an article about a model who recognized herself in one of the artist’s paintings was published, another model emerged. We thought they might like to get reacquainted.

The sculptor Jean Shin gravitates to castoff objects, including a threatened tree at Olana, the former estate of Frederic Church.

With France exiting its third Covid-19-related lockdown May 2, collector and French luxury goods magnate François Pinault’s Bourse de Commerce will open to the public for the first time on May 22, The

In 1990, Godzilla: Asian American Art Network formed to stimulate visibility and critical discourse for Asian American artists, curators, and writers who were negotiating a historically exclusionary

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, a leader of artist-activist group San Isidro Movement (MSI), has been hospitalized in Havana more than a week after embarking on a hunger strike, Al Jazeera reports. Said

Star of Mr Turner created 20 works over six-month period after gallery owner saw his talent

He is one of Britain’s most revered actors and has portrayed JMW Turner and LS Lowry on screen – and now Timothy Spall is having his own paintings hung in a solo show at a London gallery.

The gallery owner Domenic Pontone asked Spall to create a show after seeing his work at the Lowry Gallery in Salford, where 14 of Spall’s paintings were displayed in an exhibition to celebrate the release of the 2019 film Mrs Lowry & Son. “Talk about being a bit stunned,” Spall said. “I’ve always liked a challenge but I thought: Jesus, can I do this?”

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Kenjiro Okazaki is perhaps best known in the US for his 2007 collaboration with Trisha Brown, I love my robots, in which his custom-designed cyborgs performed Brown’s choreography. If the Japanese

Philanthropist and businessman Eli Broad, a devoted and powerful supporter of art and culture in Los Angeles, died in that city on April 30 at the age of eighty-seven. Though he gave generously to

James Cohan is pleased to present “The Symmetry of Tears,” an exhibition of new paintings by Eamon Ore-Giron, on view from May 1 through June 5 at 48 Walker Street. This is Ore-Giron’s debut solo

Exploring materiality through processes of sculptural modification, Lucía C. Pino creates environments where fluid bodies and planetary kinships mingle with references to ancient pasts. For their

In 1977, Stephen Shore went to New York State, Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio – in what later became known as the rust belt – to photograph factories, workers and their families

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Building an arts centre in Uganda, in a pandemic, was never going to be easy but it’s crucial to our post-Covid future

I’ve been raising funds for a building project: not a hospital, not a school, but an arts centre.

It’s not an easy sell at the best of times but add in a pandemic and the fact that I’m in Africa and, according to the current rules of financial engagement, art is the verylowest of priorities.

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With public art collections closed we are bringing the art to you, exploring highlights from across the country in partnership with Art UK. Today: William Dyce’s Beatrice, in Aberdeen

Dante Alighieri is an Italian poet whose allegory The Divine Comedy, written between 1308 and the year of his death in 1321, has had a profound influence on western thought and literature. The Beatrice of his poetry is generally identified with Beatrice Portinari, a Florentine contemporary first glimpsed by the poet when the two were nine years old. She would die young, but Dante, deeply struck by the encounter, remained devoted to an idealised image of the young woman throughout his life. His searing descriptions of her perfect beauty and perfect goodness would have a powerful afterlife in art and literature.

William Dyce was born in Aberdeen in 1806, the son of a medical professor. He studied medicine and theology in Aberdeen, but then turned to art and was a student at the Royal Academy school in London. In 1825 he went to Rome, where he was influenced by a group of German painters, the Nazarenes. Like them, Dyce wanted to promote a style of art that had the purity and spiritual intensity of the early Italian masters of the 15th century.

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He was the inventor of ‘art brut’ who rebelled against his parents, his teachers and then art itself. Yet the impact of his wild provocative paintings, often culled from graffiti, can still be seen today

Which great artist of the 20th century has been most influential on the 21st? Neither Picasso nor Matisse, as they have no heirs. And not Marcel Duchamp, however much we genuflect before his urinal. No, the artist of the last century whose ideas are everywhere today was a wine merchant who took street art and fashioned it into something extraordinary more than 75 years ago.

After four years of Nazi occupation, you’d think Parisians would have been unshockable. But in 1944, the newly liberated city was sorely provoked by the antics of Jean Dubuffet. Even as the last shots were fired, he was creating newspaper collages bearing the fragmentary graffiti messages he saw in the streets: “Emile is gone again”, “Always devoted to your orders”, “URGENT”. In the next couple of years, he unveiled shapeless, childlike paintings that abandoned all pretence at skill.

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KEWENIG is delighted to present an exhibition of paintings by Portuguese artist Cabrita (b.1956) in the gallery’s warehouse and Schaulager. It is the first time that an artist takes over the complete

A painter through and through, Ann Edholm has developed her own geometric lexicon of bold and seemingly simple shapes and spatial relationships over the last thirty years. Many references in her paintings