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Alison reveals a self-contained world where a deeply internalized identity is produced and seen

In April Dawn Alison’s photography, her solitude manifests an interior space where art and sexuality coincide, where a singular body represents divergent selves – creator and object, dominator and subjugated. We witness a self-contained world where a deeply internalized identity is produced and seen, and an ordinary space of domesticity becomes a stage for fantasy and unrestrained possibility.

While April Dawn Alison was creating feminine personas in the privacy of her Oakland apartment, I was a young adolescent in Syracuse, New York, diving into a chest of dress-up clothes that my mother kept in the basement. While Alison was creating alternate selves for the audience of a camera alone, my father, per my instructions, was taking Polaroids of me. While April Dawn Alison was meticulously filing her encyclopedia of selves, which are masterfully assembled in this book, I was sticking photos in a dime-store photo album that encapsulated the sum total of my life as a girl.

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From a spacesuited everyman to a golden-legged invader, the lunar images were astonishingly poetic works of art that captured humanity evolving before our very eyes. Can they ever be surpassed?

Fifty years ago this week, a former navy pilot created one of the most revolutionary artistic masterpieces of the 20th century, one we have yet to fully assimilate. His name was Neil Armstrong and his astonishing act of creativity is a photograph of his Apollo 11 crewmate Buzz Aldrin standing on the Sea of Tranquillity on the moon. Not that you can see Aldrin’s face. His features and flesh are hidden inside a thickly padded white spacesuit, its visor reflecting the tiny figure of Armstrong himself, beside the gold-coloured legs of the lunar lander.

This effacement of Aldrin came about because Apollo astronauts wore visors lined with gold to protect their eyes from sunlight. Yet these reflective qualities are part of what makes this such a powerful, complex image, one in which we can see two lunar horizons. Behind Aldrin, the moon’s bright surface recedes to a blue horizon against the black void of space. Meanwhile, reflected and warped by the helmet, the other horizon stretches away behind Armstrong. The photographer has incorporated the making of the image into the image, to tell the story of something new in the universe: two human beings looking at each other across the dusty surface of an alien world.

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I FIND IT USEFUL to think of Félicia Atkinson’s music—soaked through as it is with traces of places she has been and imagined—as a series of landscapes. This is an approach that’s more or less in

The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) has received a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of its new Caribbean Cultural Institute, a curatorial and research platform dedicated

The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, which was founded by philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil and built in 1971, has been awarded a $2 million grant from the Houston Endowment in support of the

The 100 homes on Goldsmith Street aren’t just smart and modern. They may be the most energy-efficient houses ever built in the UK. Could this be the start of proper social housing?

Rows of glossy black tiles glisten in the afternoon sun, dripping down the facades like a neatly controlled oil slick. They cap a long row of milky brick houses, whose walls curve gently around the corners at the end of the street, dissolving into perforated brick balustrades, marking the presence of hidden rooftop patios. A planted alley runs between the backs of the terraced houses, dotted with communal tables and benches, where neighbours are sitting down to an outdoor meal.

This is Goldsmith Street, a new development of around 100 homes, built by Norwich city council, without a profit-hungry developer in sight. They are not homes that fit into the murky class of “affordable”, or the multitude of “intermediate” tenures. This is proper social housing, rented from the council with secure tenancies at fixed rents. Not only that, it is some of the most energy-efficient housing ever built in the UK, meeting the exacting German Passivhaus standards – which translates into a 70% reduction in fuel bills for tenants. It might not look groundbreaking, but this little neighbourhood represents something quietly miraculous. And it almost didn’t happen.

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The J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles has announced that Mary Schmidt Campbell, the president of Spelman College in Atlanta, has been elected to its board of trustees. Prior to working at Spelman, a

From sweatbox buses to a novelty 'dangleway' and fantasy bridges that never saw a brick laid. Boris Johnson’s design legacy in London left the taxpayer with a bill of more than £940m after his eight years as mayor. The Guardian's design and architecture critic, Oliver Wainwright, takes a tour of the worst monuments to Johnson's ego etched across the capital. He finds out what they really cost us then and how much we are still paying for them now

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The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, announced today that Kerry Bishop has been named the institution’s managing director. Bishop comes to the ICA from Frieze, where she has served as chief

Following |https://www.artforum.com/news/british-museum-to-continue-accepting-bp-oil-money-80301|the British Museum’s decision to continue working with BP|, Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif, a museum trustee

You might think of Hong Kong, given its famous skyscraper skyline, but by different measures of verticality other cities come out on top

Looking out from sky100, Hong Kong’s highest observation deck on the 100th floor of the city’s tallest building, the 494-metre-high International Commerce Centre, you get a 360-degree view of one of the world’s most famous skylines – an urban jungle framed by mountains and the gleaming Victoria harbour, with endless clusters of high-rise buildings packed so closely together they resemble a game of Tetris.

It’s little wonder a city of such visible density has more skyscrapers than anywhere else in the world. According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), Hong Kong has 355 buildings over 150m in height.

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The New York Dance and Performance Awards, known as the Bessies, have announced the recipients of the 2019 Juried Bessie Award and Outstanding Breakout Choreographer Award, as well as the nominees for

A collection of approximately five thousand sketches, drawings, and paintings by British artist Ithell Colquhoun has been gifted to the Tate by the National Trust. The uncatalogued archive spans the

• Warning: this gallery contains images some people may find distressing

Crime scene photographs shot by Los Angeles police officers in the line of duty between 1925 and the 1970s are on show at the city’s Lucie Foundation. More than 80 images are on display, drawn from the thousands discovered in a warehouse in 2000 by the fototeka Gallery. Photographs from the Los Angeles Police Archive is on show until 11 August

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As barriers continue to rise up all over Europe, a new documentary photography exhibition investigates walls, fences and defence lines and the dramas on either side of them

• Walls of Power: Man-made Barriers Throughout Europe is at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France, from 1 July to 25 August, 2019

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From second-hand train seats to old school cupboards, the artist has transported discarded objects from his west African homeland to create a ‘parliament of ghosts’

‘We’re haunted all the time by ghosts of the past,” says Ibrahim Mahama as we sit on dirty old plastic second-class Ghana Railways carriage seats in Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery. Even these seats from an abandoned railway? “Especially these,” he says, smiling.

Mahama, a junkyard utopian whose art involves recycling stuff that’s lost its purpose, bought up rows and rows of these seats. He packed them into shipping containers and sent them on a 5,000-mile trip, from his west African homeland to the Whitworth, along with some school cupboards no longer fit for purpose, exercise books of children now grown up, and the minutes of Ghanaian parliamentary debates now deemed obsolete.

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Design of proposed 300–metre skyscraper by Norman Foster’s firm deemed not good enough

Plans to build a 300-metre (1,000ft) skyscraper dubbed “the Tulip” in the City of London near the Thames have been thrown out by the capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan.

The building, designed by Norman Foster’s architectural practice, would have been the second tallest in western Europe, but its design was deemed not to be good enough for such a prime location.

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The southern border of the United States has long been defined by those on the northern side, whose demands for contraband and low-wage workers are matched by their resistance to equitably reforming

The moon in art has changed from symbol to something real, but that hasn’t changed our will to see it.

Sadie Roberts-Joseph, a beloved activist and community leader who founded an African American Museum in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was found dead on Friday, July 12, |

The Tate, which comprises four institutions-two in London, one in Liverpool, and one in St. Ives-has appointed Victoria Cheetham as its new chief operating officer. Cheetham currently serves as executive

A new level of kawaii with a Japanese pop group, a triple-threat art option at Bard College and a Riley Stearns movie that takes on karate and fear.

The Public Art Fund in New York announced today the promotion of Kellie Honeycutt to deputy director and Daniel S. Palmer to curator. Honeycutt joined the Public Art Fund as communications director in

The secretive stenciller is no Rembrandt – but a new poll shows that ‘high art’ alienates the public more than any other cultural form

The anthropologist Marcel Mauss believed gift-giving is at the heart of human interaction. He might have seen the success of Banksy as proof, for Banksy is nothing if not giving. You never know when he might leave a mural on a garage wall in south Wales or in support of Extinction Rebellion. And as Mauss predicted, these gifts are reciprocated - in this case with a love that passeth all understanding. I don’t just mean he’s more popular than Damien Hirst or Grayson Perry. According to a poll reported in the Sun, the secretive stenciller is “Brits’ favourite painter of all time ... beating greats such as Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt and Monet.”

It is a vote that says more about us than it does about those dead artists. A meaningful comparison between Banksy and Van Gogh can only be made a century or so from now when he is part of history. Will his works endure as Van Gogh’s do? That is the only test of greatness in art. And it is one Banksy is unlikely to meet simply because his art is so pointed and current. In 100 years, will his union flag stab-proof vest worn by Stormzy at Glastonbury be anything more than a relic of pop history? Seems unlikely. But you can look at Rembrandt’s portrait of his lover Hendrickje Stoffels and her eyes pierce your soul, more than 300 years after artist and model died.

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As the Haus der Kunst (HdK) in Munich continues to struggle to find secure financial footing, a proposed plan to cut two thirds of its part-time workforce has the institution’s employees fearing mass

“Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness” at the Met Museum is a masterpiece in progress from a perfectionist who hated to say “done.”

“Sun & Sea (Marina),” which won the top prize at this year’s Venice Biennale, portrays a deceptively relaxing day at the beach.

Photography and science have long been intertwined, helping to shape the way we look at the world, as Marvin Heiferman shows in Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe, published by Aperture

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Collection of works by little-known painter will be largest by one artist in Tate’s archive

Her name has largely slipped through the gaps of art history, and those who do know her work may associate her primarily with magic and the occult – but, with the acquisition of a huge archive, Tate is hoping that the artist Ithell Colquhoun will finally get the credit and recognition she deserves as a major figure in British surrealism.

Tate has announced that more than 5,000 sketches, drawings, and commercial artworks by Colquhoun have been transferred to it by the National Trust.

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For her first big museum show in the United States, Ms. Huanca updates the tradition of body art.

Tate Modern, London
From foggy tunnels to galleries of rain, Olafur Eliasson’s hypnotic installations highlight the state of the planet, while sculptor Takis’s humanoids and insects are just magnetic

It would be hard to think of a more beguiling show than the Olafur Eliasson survey at Tate Modern. It opens with a waterfall of spectacular proportions and continues with a journey through the elements, including – literally – earth, sea and fire. Anyone who remembers lying dazed beneath Eliasson’s gigantic glowing sun in the Turbine Hall, in 2003, will know how hypnotic the Danish-Icelandic artist’s work can be. The scale is more modest here, but no less mesmerising.

Reindeer moss – a pale vanilla colour, delicate and springy – covers an entire gallery wall. The scent of it is sweet and clean and redolent of the spreading landscapes of memory, a spirit of youth that fills the air with serenity. On the floor, waves of golden water flow slowly back and forth in glass channels, meeting each other in graceful ructions: an effect of soothing familiarity.

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Ben Lewis’s new book explores the purported 500-year history of “Salvator Mundi,” a painting of Christ that shattered auction records in 2017.

The pioneering photographer Helen Levitt’s photographs captured the casual flow of life with grace and tenderness

Helen Levitt was born in New York in 1913 and died there in 2009, at the age of 95. She had a considerable reputation as a photographer but, in the years to come, it seems to me, we will cherish her still more warmly and regard her work even more highly. The black-and-white pictures from the 1930s and 40s – kids playing in the streets, old people keeping a watchful eye on the neighbourhood – have a lyrical grace and a rough-and-tumble tenderness. The kids are having a lot of fun – even if that fun involves someone getting hurt – and it’s fun looking at the pictures. They’re easy on the eye in the way that Anna Karenina is easy to read compared with Ulysses. Henri Cartier-Bresson was a decisive influence but Levitt seemed happy to survey the flow of life casually going about its unruly business rather than pouncing on instants of suddenly perfect visual geometry. Her photographic moments, as a result, contain entire childhoods, whole lifetimes of everyday disappointment and routine happiness: the kind of stuff we associate with narrative fiction rather than photographs.

In the 1950s she began shooting in colour – not as a formal experiment but as a natural extension of the urge James Agee had observed in the earlier black-and-white work: “to perceive the aesthetic reality within the existing world”. When almost all of this colour work was stolen by a burglar she started afresh in 1971.

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Artists bring their unconventional storytelling to a Bronx neighborhood of immigrants.

Theatre Works, Melbourne
Mitch Jones has previously stapled himself and pierced hooks through his face. His new show doesn’t quite live up to its title – but he doesn’t come out unscathed

Australia feeds off narratives of survival and madness: Mad Max, The Rover, Wake in Fright, even Snowtown, have all spooked audiences into imagining what they could endure. In new play AutoCannibal, presented by Theatre Works and Oozing Future, feeding is the main premise.

Set in a dystopian future after an environmental collapse, the play has the tagline: “What will we eat when we’ve consumed it all?”

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Colour has been a lifelong obsession for New York-based photographer Lucia Fainzilber, and her latest project, The Cookbook, explores nine different shades. “Each of these dishes,” she says, “presents a different combination of ingredients, all of which coexist in an attempt to create a harmonic feast for the eye.” Fainzilber, who is originally from Argentina, says the colours of New York are a big influence. “One of the things I love about living here is the variety of ingredients and ethnic food you can find. Going to the markets and finding all these ingredients with different textures and colours has inspired me a lot.”

• The Cookbook will be on show at Praxis Gallery, New York, until 7 September

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The history of swimming pools in Britain reveals a social, communal, sensual story, as a new show at the V&A reveals

I learned to swim in Aberdeen’s Bon Accord Baths, a stern, granite pile dating from 1937, executed in a purse-lipped, Scottish municipal version of art deco. While not exactly sybaritic, it did have an unforgettable sense of spatial and social drama. Replete with a four-tier diving platform and a 15ft deep end – “Scotland’s deepest deep end” – the pool was usually a frantic free for all, bodies churning in water, some hurtling perilously off the diving boards.

Ingrained in my memory, it resembled the pool in north London painted in 1971 by Leon Kossoff, the figurative artist who died earlier this month: packed with swimmers plashing and cavorting, you can practically smell the chlorine. Kossoff’s vision of cacophonous communality contrasts with David Hockney’s lushly ambrosial Californian pools of the same period, with their narcissistic lone bathers, aptly epitomising the difference between swimming in the public and private spheres.

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The running of the bulls in Pamplona, Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon, the earthquake in California and the Tour de France – the last seven days, as captured by the world’s best photojournalists.

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The sole piece in Stephen Neidich’s exhibition “Making the rounds (a place to wait)” occupies the middle of the room. Dozens of chains connected to rotating camshafts hang from the ceiling. They flit

Dionne Lee’s images respond to the genre of landscape by pointing to its roots in property ownership, colonialism, and myths of the “natural.” She aims to uncover the fraught relationship of black

As the public continues to turn a critical eye toward the sources of art institutions’ funding, London’s British Museum director Hartwig Fischer said that the institution would continue to accept funding

The new Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center, which is being built as part of a plan for the World Trade Center site in downtown Manhattan, announced today that Leslie Koch has been appointed

A New York Supreme Court judge has ruled that the committee members of Agnes Martin’s catalogue raisonné-including Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher, who represents the late artist’s estate-were within

David Zwirner is opening its first gallery in Paris. Located at 108, rue Vieille du Temple, the 8,600-square-foot ground floor space was previously occupied by the storied French gallerist Yvon Lambert

David Zwirner is opening its first gallery in Paris. Located at 108 rue Vieille du Temple, the 8,600-square-foot ground-floor space was previously occupied by the storied French gallerist Yvon Lambert

David Zwirner is opening its first gallery in Paris. Located at 108 rue Vieille du Temple, the 8,600-square-foot ground-floor space was previously occupied by the storied French gallerist Yvon Lambert

In Yalda Afsah’s video Vidourle, 2019, a mass of youngsters sift around in murky water, stirring with anticipation. One wears a statement T-shirt that reads, “DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE.” What’s the hype?

The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has named the ninety-eight recipients of its artist fellowship program, which supports New York–based artists working in the fields of architecture and design,

York Art Gallery
How does a deaf person experience music? Why are women forced to sing in A-flat? This fascinating female show grapples with the answers – and you may want to sing along

Sounds Like Her is full of ghosts. Spectres howl from speakers, they slip in between the shadowy shapes of people dancing, they push apart thick black lines of charcoal on white paper. The thing that is invisible yet still breathing down your neck in this exhibition is sound. It’s what ties together the six female artists at York Art Gallery and it is the centre of every work, whether it is a painting, video or installation.

Like the many female-centric shows currently correcting gender imbalance in the art world, Sounds Like Her creates a space where we can encounter sound-art practitioners working beyond the rigid patriarchal superstructures. For Ain Bailey, this means recording women forcing their voices into the “preferred” female pitch (A-flat below middle C, apparently); for Magda Stawarska-Beavan, it involves embracing the roles of mother and artist and recording her son’s first cry; for Sonia Boyce, it is plastering the wall in the names of black British women in the music industry.

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From poetic and political imagery in the Bronx to dancers swimming and playing tennis onstage at Lincoln Center, here’s a guide to some of what’s on offer around the city.