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Protests in Louisville, migrants crossing the Channel, wildfires in California and the enduring impact of Covid-19: the most striking images from around the world

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Megan Noh, Chapter 11 bankruptcy trustee of defunct online auction house Paddle8, this week filed suit in US Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, against John Textor, an alleged member of

“Philip Guston Now” has become Philip Guston in 2024, after four museums postponed an artist’s show that includes Klan imagery.

Pub Rock is an exhibition celebrating the vibrant Australian live music scene, with images of such quintessential Australian bands as Cold Chisel and INXS. At the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 5 September, 2020 to 14 February 2021, followed by a national tour. Entry free, bookings essential

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In Caroline Achaintre’s one-person exhibition, watercolor, ceramic, bamboo, and wool are the protagonists of a narrative that seems to emerge from the viscera of creative expression. The French-born

Hands without bodies, leather jackets with absent wearers, bronze figures with twisted legs. This deceptively sophisticated three-person exhibition, curated by Chiara Vecchiarelli, percolates with morbid

More than 140 objects from Keith Haring’s personal collection are on the block at Sotheby’s this week, with the proceeds going to benefit New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center.

In 1985, when Jo Smail emigrated from her native South Africa to Baltimore, she brought with her some scraps of paper. Among these remnants were family recipes, which were often transcribed on the backs

If the Renaissance artist’s wavy-haired youth can fetch $80m, will collections start selling off masterpieces to get them through the pandemic? Could the RA’s Michelangelo be next?

There’s money in those Renaissance hills. The Royal Academy can sniff it. Confronted with a huge pandemic deficit that may mean sacking 150 workers, some Academicians have reportedly headed up to the cobwebby attic – or rather Norman Foster’s Sackler Galleries – to put a price on their most precious heirloom. “A hundred million pounds,” they whisper. So should the RA sell The Virgin and Child With the Infant St John – Michelangelo’s poetically unfinished marble relief and the only stone sculpture of his that Britain has – to save jobs and secure the Academy’s future?

Actually, £100m may be way too low a figure – because, as the RA has doubtless noticed, Sotheby’s has just estimated a portrait by Michelangelo’s fellow Florentine Sandro Botticelli will shortly fetch at least $80m (£63m) at auction in New York. There is clearly a huge leap in preciousness between Young Man Holding a Roundel, as Botticelli’s lovely painting is called, to a sculpture that’s not only by Michelangelo’s hand but even has his chisel marks all over it. Yes, Michelangelo’s chisel, held and hammered by him, a year or so after he finished David. Gotta be worth something.

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Plymouth’s Box considers early American settlers, the British Museum reveals Tantra treasures and LGBTQ+ cowboys ride out – all in your weekly dispatch

Mayflower 400: Legend & Legacy
Native American art, including a work by contemporary Wampanoag artist Nosapocket/Ramona Peters, is set beside early settler documents and artefacts in this exhibition about the Puritan refugees from Stuart England who created a “New” England across the Atlantic.
• The Box, Plymouth.

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Camden Art Centre, London
From intricate drawings to films that branch unexpectedly, this show on the all-pervasive influence of the plant kingdom on human imagery brims with ideas, but needs pruning

Clicking and clattering, whistling, whirring and churring, composer David Tudor’s 1968 evocation of the rainforest (composed to accompany a dance by Merce Cunningham) fills the air, as you climb the stairs to enter The Botanical Mind at Camden Art Centre. With more than a hundred exhibits, dating from 15th-century Italy to post-lockdown London, and encompassing cosmological maps and mandalas from Gujarat and Rajasthan, photographs of algae, automatic writings, mossy stones and a minimalist plank, The Botanical Mind intimates some overarching, secret cosmic order that is never quite revealed. But if the cosmos doesn’t get you, plant intelligence will.

Watching F Percy Smith’s short 1930 black and white film The Strangler, we see a convulvulus searching about, finding a flax plant then twining around the stem. I am troubled by this blindly questing tendril as it searches for its next victim. If I linger too long next to the lovely Philip Taaffe monoprints nearby it might have a go at my leg. Smith, a wonderful British naturalist and pioneer of micro and time-lapse cinematography, killed himself in 1945, and is one of the many curious and interesting figures in this frequently fascinating exhibition.

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At 81, Virginia Jaramillo is having her first solo museum exhibition, at the Menil Collection. What took so long?

A highly anticipated Philip Guston retrospective conceived by curators at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and London’s

Pupils at this new primary will be able to bounce on the playground and grow food on the roof. Shame their teachers won’t be able to afford the high-end homes that funded it

With luxurious modern bathrooms, spacious open-plan living rooms and panoramic views across the city, 333 Kingsland Road sounds like any other pricey block of high-end flats. Except that, where you might normally find sunloungers on a neatly landscaped terrace, this one has a “mud kitchen”. That’s because, rather than a private gym, cinema or other aspirational concept of the kind used to sell such developments, this London high-rise comes with the joyful chaos of a primary school attached to its base.

After five long months of no school, it is a nice surprise to hear the sound of (safely bubbled) playground games in full swing, and glimpse kids fooling around on the deck that hovers above the street. You might expect such a tower to have a swanky concierge at its base, but there instead you’ll find the school reception. Meanwhile, the roof of Hackney New Primary School is given over to planters for each class to grow their own food and get mucky with mud. It is a welcome reminder, in a world increasingly devoted to overpriced apartments for young professionals and foreign investors, that cities are for children, too.

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The American artist turns the still-life cliche, a bowl of fruit, into a crazed Raft of the Medusa

A weekly Guide column in which we dissect the influences and interpretations of a work of art

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As the pandemic wreaks havoc on existing structures, we look at some visions for post-Covid cities – and how they hold up

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There is a huge, looming, unanswerable question that overshadows our cities, like an elephant squatting in the central square. Will a Covid-19 vaccine or herd immunity return us to “normal”, or will we need to redesign our cities to accommodate a world in which close proximity to other people can kill you?

After an anxious summer in the northern hemisphere, during which those of us who were able to safely do so mimicked a kind of normality with limited socialising on patios and in gardens, winter is coming – and it will test the limits of our urban design. Regardless of whether we “solve” this latest coronavirus, humanity now knows how vulnerable we are to pandemics.

Can we mitigate the effects of the next great disease before it happens? And has the colossal disruption to the way we work and travel created a renewed impetus to organise cities in a more sustainable, more pleasant way?

We asked four architecture firms to share their visions of what cities should do, now, to better design everything from offices to streets to transport – and we have analysed each one – to help inoculate our cities against a disease that is proving so difficult to inoculate against in our bodies.

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We Are Here, an exhibition of the work of new and established black female photographers in the UK, seeks to challenge their lack of representation in the sector. Sponsored by Nikon, it takes place at Blank Canvas, in Walsall, from 25 to 27 September

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The works that appeared to ignite concern include hooded Ku Klux Klan figures, a motif in Guston’s paintings since the early 1930s.

Galerie Marian Goodman is pleased to announce its first major exhibition by Adrián Villar Rojas. It is perhaps one of the most comprehensive interventions in the history of the gallery in Paris,

Indigenous artist receives $100,000 on 99th anniversary of Australia’s most prestigious portrait prize

Vincent Namatjira has won the 2020 Archibald prize for his portrait of Adam Goodes and become the first Indigenous artist to win in its 99-year history.

The painting, titled Stand Strong for Who You Are, features the former footballer and Swans great Goodes clasped hand in hand with Namatjira.

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The harshness of life behind bars is designed to crush inmates’ individuality. But a stirring exhibition at MoMA PS1 shows the prison-industrial complex can’t stifle the artistic impulse.

Alec Soth’s first solo exhibition in China has come at the lowest point, politically, in US-China relations in several decades. That “The Space Between Us” has proven to be immensely popular—crowds

US hedge fund manager Alexander Klabin has acquired a minority stake in storied auction house Sotheby’s and will serve as executive chairman of the company’s financial arm, Sotheby’s Financial Services

The Artist Relief fund announced today that it will continue to distribute unrestricted $5,000 grants to US artists in straitened financial situations through the end of 2020. The fund, which has raised

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

South London Gallery
Vapour, shattered glass, glitter strewn across the floor – now feels like the right moment for the Belgian artist’s playful, shimmering work

Buckets of glitter, coloured lights and a hall of mirrors. No, the carnival isn’t back in town. These are the raw ingredients for Ann Veronica Janssens’ sparkling takeover of South London Gallery (SLG). The glitter – iridescent blue with a hint of pink – has been strewn in armfuls across the wooden floor of SLG’s main Victorian gallery, like the offspring of Jackson Pollock’s studio floor and a Disney princess party. Walk past and it coruscates. Sneeze and it would shift. It’s so airy that it makes Katharina Grosse’s spray painting of the same space in 2017 look positively cumbersome. Midway through the show, the glitter will be swept up and thrown away, replaced with a set of highly polished bicycles that you are invited to ride, bouncing light around the room as you go.

Janssens works in the realm of floaty impermanence, playing with light, space, reflection and perception. Judged as simple sculptural forms, the Belgian artist’s work is restrained in the extreme: bicycles aside, this is largely a collection of cubes, sheets and rings. The objects’ liveliness emerges as they connect the person observing them with the surrounding space. Often they create the setting for a performance in which you star: perfect for our self-regarding era, though Janssens has been working this area for decades.

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City centres are likely to see fewer cars in future, but that would have happened eventually without Covid-19

Predicting the future of cities is risky, especially if one heeds the words of the American baseball legend, Yogi Berra, that “the future ain’t what it used to be”.

In the period since the start of the pandemic it might seem as if everything is different, but in the long term, I would suggest that rather than changing anything, it has merely hastened and magnified trends that were already apparent before the virus struck.

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The work the artist made near the end of his life changed my understanding of both beauty and suffering.

Jerzy Kalina installation is response to controversial statue of pope being struck down by meteor

An unusual sculpture depicting John Paul II holding up a meteorite has been unveiled in Warsaw – as an artistic response to a controversial statue showing a meteor striking down the late pope.

Jerzy Kalina’s installation outside the National Museum, titled Poisoned Source, shows the Polish pope holding the meteorite high over a pool of red water representing blood.

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An exhibition of drawings and paintings stretches over several decades of the artist’s long career, but only comes to life in its — and her — final efforts.

Sotheby’s says estimate for 550-year-old painting is largest it has ever set for an old master

A Sandro Botticelli portrait of a wealthy and handsome young man, described as one of the greatest Renaissance paintings remaining in private hands, is to appear at auction with an estimate of more than $80m (£63m).

Sotheby’s said it was the largest estimate for an old master painting it had ever set, a reflection of its importance and rarity.

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A virtual tour looks at the legal battles and innovations behind 42nd Street. Our critic chats with the Harvard professor Jerold S. Kayden.

Al Murray impressions, a seaside sex club, Martin Luther King’s Geordie excursion … all turn up in the films of the six artists shortlisted for the annual Jarman award. Here’s a gallery of their work, and what they say about it

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‘He wasn’t keen on keeping still. He moaned: “You’re killing me, you know.” My companion said: “Well, come on, Mr Lowry, you always say you want to die”’

The ease with which my photographing Lowry was arranged was nothing short of remarkable. I’d always admired his work and what I had read about him intrigued me. That’s why in 1975, when I heard the Royal Academy was planning a show of his paintings, on a whim I asked a young woman involved in the exhibition whether it might be possible to photograph him. She told me it shouldn’t be a problem, and a week later she and I were off to Salford on the train.

I don’t remember much about Lowry’s home. From the outside, the house itself was unremarkable; once inside, though, it felt a little stranger. The entrance was dark, with a collection of grandfather clocks consuming his hallway. I wasn’t invited further in.

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Nicola Tyson speaks about her self-portraiture, creating drawings under lockdown, and humor in the exhibition “Sense of Self” at Petzel Gallery through October 3rd 2020.     

Filmed in 2019, the artist’s US travelogue risks feeling outdated. However its theme of racial unrest is more relevant than ever – as is Perry’s emphasis on listening

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 only poured rocket fuel on the UK’s seemingly unquenchable fascination with how American society functions – or doesn’t. Grayson Perry’s Big American Road Trip (Channel 4) marks the latest attempt by a travelling Brit to unravel and understand some of the nation’s starkest problems and divisions. “We’re interested in a hopeful story about the American dream,” he says to one of the men he meets here, a brief but telling summary of how he first approached the trip. But Perry filmed the series in the summer of 2019, to air before this year’s looming election. He may not have reckoned with the whiplash speed of an apocalyptic news cycle: much of what has happened since already makes this feel like a relic of a different era.

On a motorbike built especially for the series, Perry rides across the country in the trademark brightly coloured leathers that mark him out as an eccentric and an outsider. This is a useful tactic for explorers in his position. It reveals him as an observer from the off, a merely curious presence with no skin in the game. He does not bother with the faux-naivety of someone like Louis Theroux, say, preferring a more directly cerebral approach. In this first episode of three, he rides around the south, focusing mainly on Atlanta, with a brief detour to Washington DC.

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The end of the protracted legal fight over the assets of Robert Indiana is in sight, as the Morgan Foundation, Indiana’s longtime representative, reached an out-of-court agreement with the Star of Hope

Though the country has recently experienced a spike in coronavirus cases and increased restrictions surrounding travel, Vienna Contemporary, Austria’s largest art fair, is scheduled to take place on

Hergé’s cover for The Blue Lotus to be sold 80 years after it was deemed too colourful to publish

The original Hergé cover for Tintin and the Blue Lotus is being auctioned with an estimated value of €3m (£2.75m), more than 80 years after it was rejected as too colourful and given to a seven-year-old boy as a keepsake.

The Belgian artist had been pleased with his drawing for the cover for his fifth album of the adventures of Tintin in 1936, only to be told it would be too expensive to mass produce due to the use of four colours in the drawing of his heroic young reporter facing a dragon.

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In California, the Institute of Contemporary Art San José will open for voting, with a mural by Amir H. Fallah on display.

Immersive film of Moria camp in Greece is part of focus on 100 years of refugee experiences

Immersive film footage from one of the most desperate places in Europe, the sprawling Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, is to go on display as part of events exploring 100 years of refugee experiences.

The Imperial War Museum in London will on Thursday open displays and installations that were meant to have opened in April but were delayed by the pandemic.

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Organizers of Art Dubai recently declared that its fourteenth edition will take place in person next year from March 17–20 and that the fair will involve a revised format and expansion, stretching beyond

For three weeks, two teams from Agence France-Presse followed Walid, a Kuwaiti, Falah, an Iraqi, and his two daughters, from the town of Grande-Synthe in northern France to Dover via the choppy waters of the Channel. Photographs by Sameer Al-Doumy. Text by by Clement Melki, Sameer Al-Doumy, Thomas Bernardi with the London bureau

Sameer Al-Doumy is a Syrian photographer born in Douma. He has spent seven years covering the war that has wracked his country since the 2011 uprising, including three years documenting human rights violations in his hometown. In late 2014, he began working for Agence France-Press as a self-taught freelance photographer. He believes in photography as a way to achieve change and justice. Sameer has had to leave Syria for his own safety, and works under a pseudonym to protect himself and his family members.

Britain! After years trekking through countless countries, weeks in a filthy camp on the French coast, seven gruelling hours on a small boat tossed about by the Channel, Walid has finally made it. He’s managed to cross the so-called death route. His friend Falah, though, is still waiting.

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The British Wildlife Photography awards is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a retrospective touring outdoor exhibition. The retrospective will for the first time include all the overall winners, along with a selection of category winners and highly commended images.

The competition has captured the imagination of photographers from all over the UK, who have created a unique legacy showcasing British wildlife at its best and inspired millions across the world with outstanding wildlife photography.

The exhibition begins its tour with an inventive outdoor show and experience in the garden and park of Astley Hall in Chorley, Lancashire, from 19 September to March 2021

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Luke Gilford spent four years immersing himself in LGBTQ+ rodeo culture – and discovered a world where steer-roping meets lip-sync battles and camp glamour

• Kissing cowboys: the queer rodeo stars bucking a macho American tradition

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Photographer Luke Gilford couldn’t believe his eyes when he first stumbled across a gay rodeo. He set out to capture the joyous, tender, authentic world he saw there

• America’s queer cowboys – in pictures

Luke Gilford was at a Pride event in northern California in 2016 when he was drawn to a stand by the sound of Dolly Parton singing 9 to 5. What he found there would change his life. Members of the local chapter of the Golden State Gay Rodeo Association were promoting what they do, and how they live. Gilford looked on in astonishment. “I grew up around this world,” he says. “I had no idea this existed. I really didn’t think it was real.”

A sought-after film-maker and photographer, to whom Barbara Kruger is a mentor and Pamela Anderson and Jane Fonda muses, Gilford cuts a striking figure. A New York Times profile that same year recounted how you could often catch a glimpse of him downtown, in a hand-me-down cowboy hat, football-style shoulder pads over his bare torso.

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Sound art will be the focus of three significant fall exhibitions at the Reina Sofía. In “Disonata,” Paris-based art historian Maike Aden foregrounds works that challenge traditional conceptions of art

The roving international art exhibition is carrying on despite the pandemic. This edition, in Marseille, could be a model for biennials in a changed world.

London’s cash-strapped Royal Academy is contemplating the sale of a Michelangelo masterpiece, the 515-year-old Taddeo Tondo, as a means of raising funds and staving off the otherwise inevitable layoffs

George Ortman’s radiant relief paintings at Mitchell Algus; works from Lucia Nogueira’s brief but remarkable career; and Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya’s otherworldly sculptures.