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Ariana Reines’s new moon report

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Natural History Museum, London
It all starts off quite Beatrix Potter with foxes and owls. Then come the screeching bats, eyeless etras and cave boas – and you’re left gawping like a deep-sea fish

When the curators of the Natural History Museum’s engrossing journey into some of the most extreme ecosystems on Earth planned this exhibit – which includes a mannequin cave diver – they can’t have guessed how its meaning would change by the time the show opened. Seeing it in the week 12 boys and their football coach were rescued by divers from the flooded Tham Luang cave, the mannequin looks like a statue of a modern hero.

This exhibition shows how the techniques that enabled the Wild Boar football team to be located and saved come from the cutting edge of exploration. Caves are one of Earth’s undiscovered countries. Only about 10% of the spaces carved under the planet’s surface by rainwater reacting with limestone are known to humans. Cave diving is almost as difficult and adventurous as space travel. It is also, we see in this show, making startling scientific discoveries. The creepy crawlies on view are a glimpse of some of nature’s most spine-tingling marvels. There’s a cave boa that hunts bats in the dark, a giant centipede that also feasts on the same poor bats and cockroaches that eat their guano. And ugh, you can smell that guano.

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Artist praised for ‘nomadic’ quality of King and Queen painting on cotton sheets

A painting on three billowing cotton sheets by Jacqui Hallum has beaten 2,700 other entries to become the 30th winner of the £25,000 John Moores prize in Liverpool.

King and Queen of Wands draws inspiration from a deck of tarot cards: the king and queen can be seen at either end, and Hallum describes the space between them as “akin to a reading”.

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Gregor Sailer traveled the globe photographing Potemkin villages, architectural landscapes that are clones, impostors or frauds.

Inspired by a drawing of petrol pump in an issue of Tintin, Pete McKee quit his job to paint. His work is now loved by everyone from Arctic Monkeys to Paul Smith – and even Disney

In the 13 years since he sold his first painting at the age of 39, Pete McKee – a former supermarket shelf-stacker and postman – has achieved a lot. His exhibitions have attracted 15,000 people. He has collaborated with everyone from Disney to Arctic Monkeys. And his fans include Ken Loach, Maxine Peake and Richard Hawley. Noel Gallagher once phoned to say one painting – a kid practicing guitar on a bed – summed up his youth.

Yet he remains all but ignored by London-based critics. “My work doesn’t require dissection or over-interpretation,” he says. “So it gets pooh-poohed. But the minimalism is deliberate. It means the stories resonate. These are my memories, but people look at them and see their own. Like with A Good Education, I wasn’t painting Noel Gallagher’s youth. I was painting mine. But he understood where that came from.”

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Nikki Columbus sees #MeToo parallel after MoMA PS1 ‘turned on a dime’ when she told them she had recently given birth

The curator at the center of a gathering art-world storm over gender and parental discrimination says her experience of losing out on a major New York arts institution job – allegedly after revealing she had recently given birth – is at the next frontier of the #MeToo movement.

Nikki Columbus, 43, an outgoing editor at Parkett magazine, last week sued the edgy, Queens-based MoMA PS1 contemporary art museum for discrimination. She accuses three senior museum executives of abruptly dropping an offer to make her associate curator of performance, upon learning that she was a new mother. She claims the move violatescity laws regarding caregivers, pregnancy and women’s rights.

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Swirls of yellow paste made from ground bark decorate the cheeks of Rohingya Muslim women and girls in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar in southern Bangladesh. Thanaka, a type of sun protection that dates back centuries, is a common sight on the faces of the women, who say using the traditional cooling paste helps bring a sense of normality to camp life

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A new exhibition of street shots from the 1980s captures everyone who was anyone in the early days of hip-hop, from Biz Markie to Run DMC and Rock Steady Crew

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Inspired by the vibrant hues of the Nigerian city, an invasion of lurid triangles will soon be shaking up John Soane’s sober Dulwich Picture Gallery

A psychedelic castle will land on a lawn in leafy Dulwich, London, next summer, bringing a shocking dose of colour to the well-heeled suburb. Planned to stand like an oversize party hat in the garden of John Soane’s sober Dulwich Picture Gallery, the great Technicolor crown is the winning design for the Dulwich Pavilion. The biennial commission, now in its second year, is a youthful alternative to the Serpentine’s established pavilion programme across the river. Selected through an open competition and co-organised with the London Festival of Architecture, it aims to provide a platform for emerging designers rather than global stars, bringing some fresh energy to the oldest purpose-built gallery in the world.

“We were trying to imagine what might have happened if Soane had extended his European grand tour to the African continent,” says Dingle Price, one half of Pricegore, the practice behind the winning design, who developed their proposal with furniture designer Yinka Ilori. “We wanted to come up with something that could be more representative of today’s London, and attract a wider range of people to the gallery.”

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An organizer of an international triennial of contemporary art sold more than 110 artists on the charms of Cleveland and the surrounding area.

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Jenny Saville’s “Ancestors”; Jason Dodge’s intimate objects; Luke Murphy’s geometric sculptures; and Shana Moulton and Nick Hallett‘s hallucinatory videos.

The Rothschild Pentateuch, dated 1296 and featuring extensive illuminations, will go on display in August at the museum after being long out of view.

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An exhibition in Germany is proposing a different way to organize artifacts in a postcolonial era. It’s ambitious, sweeping — and just a little bit demented.

I fear Mackintosh’s fire-ravaged masterpiece is in danger of being lost to future generations if decisions are taken meanly or hastily

These are worrying times for all who care about saving the finest works by one of the world’s greatest architects, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. For 2018, the 150th anniversary of his birth, was meant to be a year of celebration but instead will be remembered as the Scotsman’s annus horribilis, with the future of his two most famous works at great risk.

First, his celebrated Hill House in Helensburgh, as fine a house as anything produced by Frank Lloyd Wright in America, is closed and about to be covered in a vast tarpaulin. Beneath this, conservators will grapple one last time to find a definitive solution to keep out the driving rain, which has long saturated the exteriors and damaged the precious interiors of this house, designed by Mackintosh for the publisher Walter Blackie in 1902, and now owned by the National Trust for Scotland. However, even more critical is the immediate future of Mackintosh’s masterpiece, the Glasgow School of Art.

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‘We canoed across a river, hiked up into the rainforest, then waited three days in 30C heat for them to appear’

I had to wait three days to get this picture, but, when the moment came, it was breathtaking. I was at Yasuní national park, a protected region of the Amazon in eastern Ecuador, spending two weeks with a group of young photographers on a conservation programme. We documented the wildlife, plants and indigenous communities working to maintain the rainforest.

For three days, we hunkered down in a makeshift shack in the rainforest surrounding Clay Lake, where a pool of mud and water collected at the base of a wall. It was gruelling: the temperature never dipped below 30C and it was extremely humid. Each morning, we left our accommodation, canoed across the river, and hiked to this secluded spot in the hope of spotting cobalt-winged parakeets.

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The pavement pastime is now an Olympic sport. A new exhibition called Against the Grain captures its astonishing journey – and some appalling falls

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Artnet

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Radiohead returns to Madison Square Garden, the Boston Symphony Orchestra heads to its summer home and Ms. Childs restages her minimalist opus “Available Light.”

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Artist described as ‘a radical in the vein of Blake and Turner’ who was commissioned to draw every cathedral in England

On Valentine’s Day morning in 1987 Dennis Creffield set off from his third floor flat on Marine Parade in Brighton to draw every cathedral in England. Travelling around the country in a campervan, Creffield, who has died aged 87, would wake early each day to avoid rubberneckers, set up his easel, and sketch the exteriors of the great buildings in charcoal. Canterbury Cathedral is rendered as a series of sparse dashed lines, Durham Cathedral is barely visible in a smog of charcoal clouds.

Creffield, a bohemian character whom the writer Philip Dodd described as “an English radical in the vein of Blake and Turner”, eschewed proper representation throughout his career, wishing instead, in his own words to “inhabit” his subject matter. When he embarked on a series of works taking inspiration from the figure of Horatio Nelson he made himself a hat mimicking that worn by the admiral. “I don’t look at the drawings while drawing,” the artist said. “I simply smell, listen and respond to them.”

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Tower will be able to accommodate more than 6,000 workers with free public viewing gallery

A 56-storey tower called The Diamond is set to join the growing cluster of skyscrapers in the City of London and will be the financial district’s third-tallest building when completed.

The planned 263.4m tower at 100 Leadenhall Street will rank behind 1 Undershaft at 290m, nicknamed the Trellis, where work is yet to start, and 22 Bishopsgate, the reworked Pinnacle at 278m, which is under construction. All three will eclipse the nearby Heron Tower, currently the tallest building in the Square Mile at 231m.

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Exclusive: Tom Inns says it is ‘critically important’ the building is saved after fire

Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh building, which was gutted by fire last month, will be rebuilt, the school’s director has told the Guardian.

The commitment by Tom Inns ends weeks of speculation about the fate of the 110-year-old building, after many experts raised fears that the scale of the blaze would make it impossible to rescue and rebuild it.

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Ten times more porters than soldiers died in Africa during the first world war. But they have never been properly commemorated. Now Tate Modern is putting this right – with William Kentridge’s most eye-popping show yet

A steady rain beats down on the steel roof of a rehearsal hall at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, filling the cavernous space with a tinny thrum. Inside, The Head and the Load, a kaleidoscopic tableau of carefully controlled chaos, deftly steered by William Kentridge, has been going through its first-ever dry run; but the rain has brought things to a momentary halt.

“It appears we have some competition,” the South African artist says, wearily emerging on stage to address the small audience assembled for the piece’s run-through. “This is going to be slow, I’m afraid.”

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Keith Sonnier on his life, art, and shows in Long Island, New York

A veteran of the graffiti wars showcases the journey of New York’s street artists out of the subways and into museums.

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Madrid’s annual photography festival is a riot of fun and fantasy, with vintage circus acts, people pretending to be potatoes and Samuel Fosso’s sardonic take on classic images

PhotoEspaña, the annual photography festival that takes over Madrid, is this year infused with the spirit of playfulness. Of the 90 exhibitions that fill the city’s museums and cultural spaces, five core shows have been selected and curated by the photographer Cristina de Middel, best known for her Afronaughts series, a playful reimagining of Zambia’s short-lived 1960s space mission. In Middel’s world, play isn’t a time-wasting, puerile distraction but an essential part of creativity. It is an invitation to stop and think differently.

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“The old ways of doing things have changed. The new generation does things differently. But me, I have two ways.”

John Mawurndjul is internationally celebrated for his mastery of rarrk (fine-painted cross-hatching), a tradition shared by generations of Kuninjku artists.

In Kuninjku and English, the master bark painter gives us a tour of selected works from the past 40 years, telling the stories of Kuninjku culture and places in western Arnhem Land and currently on show in an artist-led major survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

• Feature photograph taken by Jacquie Manning.

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Art Newspaper

The museum denies any bias, but the curator has brought her discrimination complaint to the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

Skylar Fein’s new exhibition is part of a larger movement in the city to recognize, finally, the victims of the UpStairs Lounge fire in 1973.

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Just as Cheim & Read closes in Chelsea, Adam Sheffer, one of its longtime partners, becomes a vice president at Pace.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie on the fifth edition of Jaou Tunis

A growing number of psychologists are focusing their studies on aesthetics and the question of why we like what we like.

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From ancient African spirituality to the futuristic realm of the transhuman, the much-loved photography festival was still visionary despite its restricted space

• Global visions: the 49th Arles photography festival – in pictures
  

The metal exterior of the 200ft tall Frank Gehry building glows bright gold in the setting sun. A beacon of the new Arles, this is the home of the Luma Foundation, set up by billionaire art collector Maja Hoffmann. With 100,000 square feet of space to show contemporary conceptual art,it aims to attract the international art jet set. The unspoken question on everyone’s lips is: whither photography in this glamorous new world?

The answer is that Les Rencontres – the most famous and best-loved photography festival in the world – is surviving, albeit in much reduced circumstances. The main problem is lack of space, with the Parc des Ateliers – where huge disused train sheds used to house the bulk of the images – now being remade beneath the Gehry tower as a hub for conceptual art. Impressive as the Luma Foundation’s ambition is, it is being pursued with a Darwinian thrust that may yet be the festival’s undoing.

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