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The architects behind New York’s High Line have created a new urban space that reflects the diversity of Russia’s regional landscapes.

An evocative image of 1970s lads captured by Daniel Meadows during a documentary tour of the UK

In 1973, Daniel Meadows bought an old Leyland Titan double-decker bus for £360.20. He spent the next 14 months driving around Britain, covering 10,000 miles and stopping in 22 places, where he gave passing locals a print of themselves in return for having their portrait taken. The Daily Mirror ran a feature on Meadows and his bus entitled “The Great Ordinary Show”. The bus, he later said, “was my home, my travelling darkroom, my gallery”.

Meadows, as this group shot shows, was a master of the great ordinary. His main subject, he said later, was “the British people... just ordinary folk”. The works that constitute his now  classic documentary series The Bus are formal and monochrome, evincing the austere economic climate of early 1970s Britain, but also recalling a place where the idea of a working-class community still held sway.

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Inspired by the art of ikebana – a traditional style of Japanese flower arranging – Montreal-based artist Raku Inoue hand-crafts bugs using materials from his garden. He transforms his garden waste, including sticks, seeds and petals, to create his Natura Insects series. “I think about the main shape of the insect,” he says, “and try to find something to satisfy that. It’s very much like a puzzle.” As the year progresses, his creative options change. “I choose the materials according to what nature offers during that time. All four seasons offer many different materials to play with.” The series started as a morning routine over coffee to sharpen his thoughts for the day. “It was never meant to be a complex process, but rather an easygoing, morning mind-stretching exercise.”

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Foundling Museum, London
Lily Cole’s moving short film is a fine addition to the Foundling Museum’s fascinating art collection

Two girls appear on a split screen, one black, one white. Each is anxiously rocking a baby. One after the other, they are called before a panel of grave-faced men to be questioned about their children. Or rather, to be asked how they came to be pregnant in the first place, whether the conception was forced upon them, and in what circumstances. What will they do if the baby is accepted, asks the senior inquisitor, strictness rising in his voice. And have the girls attended Sunday school?

This is the opening twist in artist and model Lily Cole’s fine new film for the Foundling Museum. The disjuncture between past and present is deliberate. For although these scenes are filmed in contemporary times, conveying the hardships of teenage single mothers in council flats, parts of the script are taken directly from the transcripts of actual cases that came before Thomas Coram’s Foundling hospital for 19th-century children whose mothers could not keep them.

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Sunshine, sensuality, and a dash of danger... the ‘warm south’ has fascinated writers and artists for hundreds of years. But why are the Brits so obsessed?

Some readers may be lucky enough this holiday season to experience one day, or just a moment, however fleeting, of balmy fulfilment, when everything is perfect. When you just want to freeze everything, capture the sense of satiated pleasure and take it home with you.

The Anglo-American artist John Singer Sargent had one such day when he was painting friends on the terrace of a villa in the Alban hills close to Rome during the summer of 1907. Taking a break for refreshment, he joked that they should all take strychnine: such was the depth of his contentment that he wanted to lie down and die. The hit ITV series about the escapades of the Durrell family in 1930s Corfu evokes more simply the Mediterranean’s symbolic power to resolve and soothe harassed minds.

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Wildfires in California, airstrikes in Gaza, protests in Buenos Aires, the 2018 European Championships and the face veil ban in Denmark – the week captured by the world’s best photojournalists

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Ariana Reines’s new moon report

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The small Rubin tackles the big subject of time, in six exhibitions that cover a wide swath, from the Second Buddha to Indo-Futurism.

Jess Barbagallo on Bridget Everett & The Tender Moments

Nick Pinkerton on a Pixelvision film series at Film Society

Two years in the making, a new exhibition about white culture is delivering devastating insights into power and prejudice in modern America. Poet and curator Claudia Rankine relives its creation

Two years ago I founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). We were initially a small group of three or four who expanded into a group of 10 curators, of all races, genders and sexual orientations. We met on Sundays, in person or by conference call, to talk about how to think about white supremacy. Our discussions happened as unarmed black people across the US were being killed, “alt-right” groups marched with tiki torches on Charlottesville, ending with three deaths, and the president – whose run-up to office emboldened and amplified hate against immigrants, Muslims, women, gay people and other minorities – continued to make policy out of racist rhetoric.

Black Americans were targeted by the police and white Americans were reporting people to the police because they were black. We decided to use the theorist Sara Ahmed’s “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” as an organising thesis. She argues that institutions are not “simply given” but rather that they “become given” as they repeat decisions over time in service of “the reproduction of whiteness”. Two years of collective labour culminated in TRII’s first biennial exhibition, On Whiteness, which took place in New York this month.

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This year’s awards in Darwin merge the old and the new with modern materials and technology

In Yolngu culture “rock solid” cultural conventions dictate that artists use the land for their art, which can be only of an artist’s own identity or that of their mother or grandmother. For artists such as Gunybi Ganambarr, who won the overall prize at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art awards (Natsiaa), that definition is malleable.

Ganambarr’s striking work is unique for its use of shiny modern sheets of metal – some leftover aluminium panels, essentially found objects on his traditional land.

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The former supermodel fills in the foundling’s story, artists have fun with animals and a Lancashire boy blazes a trail across America – all in our weekly dispatch

Lily Cole: Balls
A film about Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff, one of the most famous foundlings in literature, and how his fictional story resonates with the real lives of children who were left at London’s Foundling hospital in the 18th and 19th centuries.
• Foundling Museum, London, until 2 December.

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The 20th-century British artist takes (another) turn for the unconventional

This 1934 work is certainly true to Stanley Spencer’s famous remark: “I am on the side of angels and of dirt.” It portrays a dustman, returned home to the arms of his wife. She lifts him up like Christ ascending to heaven, or an ecstatic child, in their front garden.

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Can a billionaire bring together his divided city? With Gathering Place, George B. Kaiser and Michael Van Valkenburgh challenge what an urban park can be.

Public housing estates in Hong Kong have become wildly popular destinations for photography, drawing the ire of some residents.

Our guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon.

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Hoping to reflect a broader range of visitors, museums are diversifying their staffs, welcoming a more inclusive generation of future leaders.

Acres of green space, new or expanded, along the Brooklyn and Queens shorelines offer quiet places to pause, look and stroll. What are you waiting for?

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Allegations of institutional racism at the organisation overshadow presidential race

The Royal Institute of British Architects has elected Alan Jones as its next president, amid accusations that it tried to silence criticism from a leading black architect who also stood for the post.

Jones, who is the RIBA’s education vice-president, will take over the two-year presidential term – the highest elected position in UK architecture – from Ben Derbyshire in September next year. Jones has his own practice in County Antrim and is a senior lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Sérgio B. Martins on Antonio Dias (1944–2018)

The 23-year-old has become the first ever black photographer to shoot the cover of Vogue, a groundbreaking achievement for an audacious talent

On Monday, coinciding with the release of Vogue’s venerated September issue, the photographer Tyler Mitchell made history: two photos he’d taken of Beyoncé graced the cover of two different editions of the issue, making him the first black photographer to shoot a cover in the entirety of the magazine’s 126-year history. At age 23, he’s also the one of the youngest photographers to do so (a distinction he shares with David Bailey, who was also 23 when he shot a cover in the 60s).

Related: Tyler Mitchell is making history, with a little help from Beyoncé | Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff

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The New Art Dealers Alliance announced that it would cancel its annual fair, one of many in a crowded scene, and open a new gallery for its members.

He was involved in many major restoration and salvation projects, including Carnegie Hall, the Ellis Island museum and the World Trade Center staircase.

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Dorothea Rockburne’s mathematical influences; John Lucas and Claudia Rankine explore blondness; and 23 artists form a show at Klaus von Nichtssagend.

‘The winners of the Oxford University rowing race would set a boat on fire and then – after a long, boozy dinner – jump through the blaze arm in arm’

I took this shot at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1984. I had heard that whoever won the summer rowing competition would set fire to a boat in celebration. Oriel had won seven years in a row at that point, and I remember there were complaints that it was all getting out of hand.

The whole event was slightly mad. After a long, boozy dinner, groups of suited men would run arm-in-arm and jump through the blaze, or dash through the embers in their smart shoes. It was dangerous, but nobody seemed to care.

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Patric McCoy, an enthusiastic art buyer, has some 1,300 paintings, sculptures and drawings stuffed into his Chicago apartment.

From photography to abstract work, via painting and tapestry, more than 30 artists are showing work at the African Passions exhibition in Évora, Portugal

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The sprawling photography festival will arrive at the Brooklyn Bridge Plaza in Dumbo this September.

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Azza Abo Rebieh got her guards to give her pencils and paper, then began sketching the faces and habits of fellow inmates in Syria’s notorious detention system.