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Ernest C Withers’ photographs take viewers to the record stores, picket lines and proms of the American south during the 1940s, 50s and 60s

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For this new exhibition (the eighth at Galerie Lelong), which she has entitled “From Inside,” Kiki Smith has brought together a group of new bronzes representing hands, which she juxtaposes with two

Comprising more than 200 colour photographs, Porch Diaries is a series by Melbourne-based photographer Alana Holmberg featuring portraits of neighbours, strangers, workers and loved ones who passed by her Brunswick home during the 2020 pandemic lockdown months in Melbourne. With the recent spike in cases, Melbourne was back in lockdown and Holmberg was back on the porch

30 March 2020

Some days I feel like a creep. My spot up here on the porch, partially obscured behind the lemon tree, kept vertical by a stake, and the row of spindly roses. Twice this morning my presence went undetected. A metre or so above the path, I sit on a worn-out couch with a worn-out laptop, my eyes flicking from screen to street and down to screen again. Who else will pass by today? Mara, my housemate’s dog, takes her usual position to my right, propped up on my thigh. We watch and we wait.

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The artist Donald Judd’s two-story office in Texas was in the final stages of a renovation that was set to finish July 3.

Officials have refused to refer a dispute over the work held by the state painting collections to a national commission created to review claims of art lost in the Nazi era.

Experimental sound artist and multi-instrumentalist Yoshi Wada died at his home in New York on May 18 at the age of seventy-seven. The news was announced on Twitter by composer Tashi Wada, his son and

The proceeds from Stuart Weitzman’s “Inverted Jennies,” a 1933 gold piece known as the double eagle and the One-Cent Magenta stamp will go to charitable ventures.

The Detroit Institute of Arts sponsored the mural as part of its efforts to support art in the communities it serves, but critics say the “pro-police” art work sends the wrong message.

She planted the seed for SandSong shortly before her untimely death in 2019. Now the acclaimed company is bringing the story of her country to life

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following article contains the name of someone who has died

In rehearsal studios at Sydney’s Walsh Bay, 16 dancers are recreating the experiences of the traditional owners of the Western Australian Kimberley region.

The work, called SandSong, is set against the region’s extreme seasons: the dry, the wet, and the build-up to the cold.

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Gallery staff exploring ways of deterring pests from damaging priceless 16th-century tapestries

The exquisite set of Raphael tapestries currently on display in the grand gallery of Madrid’s royal palace has survived five tumultuous centuries of wars, rebellions, bombs, bullets and fire – only to find itself menaced by the more quotidian threat of opportunistic pigeons and their droppings.

The nine tapestries, which depict scenes from the Acts of the Apostles, were created in Brussels in the mid-16th century using the original sketches drawn by the Italian master whom Pope Leo X commissioned to design a set of life-size hangings to adorn the Sistine Chapel in 1514.

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Storied New York arts nonprofit the Kitchen has appointed Legacy Russell executive director and chief curator. Russell, who since 2018 has served as associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum

FOUR YEARS AGO, the composer Alvin Lucier, then 86, performed his best-known piece, I am sitting in a room (1969), at ISSUE Project Room in downtown Brooklyn. Sitting cross-legged in a folding chair

My friend Colin Failes, who has died aged 73 of pulmonary fibrosis, was one of the most accomplished mural painters in the UK, with specialist skills in perspective and trompe l’oeil techniques.

Large public and private commissions included the Vanbrugh Club at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre in Guildford, Surrey, the Everyman theatre in Cheltenham, Arlington House in London, the P&O liners, the Vintners’ Company in the City of London and his contribution to the great Spanish Armada series at the House of Lords.

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Currently the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, she takes over in September from Tim Griffin as executive director and chief curator.

When the Bad Seeds singer found a solitary child’s glove hanging over a road sign he felt a ‘jolt of grief’ which led him on a photographic journey. He talks us through it

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The bars, cafes, bookshops and even hair salons of London all fed into this year’s enormous pavilion. Sumayya Vally, the project’s youngest ever architect, explains all

Fragments of fluted classical columns collide with steps, ledges and bits of curved moulding, like an impromptu playground collaged together from an architectural salvage yard. It is an intriguing dream landscape, with ghostly echoes of familiar London features, all rendered in creamy shades of cement and brought together beneath an enormous circular roof that hovers six metres overhead.

This is the new Serpentine Pavilion designed by Counterspace, a Johannesburg practice led by 31-year-old Indian South African architect, Sumayya Vally. It is fitting that the youngest architect ever selected for the annual commission should come up with one of the biggest structures yet. Its size is not only in its physical heft, but in its far-reaching scope beyond the bounds of Kensington Gardens: for the first time, this year sees four additional structures scattered across the city, as well as the launch of a new fellowship programme for artists working with spatial politics and community practice.

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“trust & confusion” is an exhibition about the conversation of certainty and chance; the transformative power of bodies, intangibles, and ephemeral encounters; music and magic; and the luck of being

Tomokazu Matsuyama’s solo exhibition “Boom Bye Bye Pain” (May 22 – July 10, 2021) is the first show to be held at KOTARO NUKAGA’s new space in Roppongi, Tokyo, and the New York-based artist’s first

“She lives in the blurry world where images can come from anywhere and where most of our experience, even with paintings, comes from reproductions, which have somehow desensitized our experience of the

“INK CITY” sets out an expanded vision of ink art firmly grounded in current social, political, and aesthetic concerns, featuring artists inspired by immediate encounters with contemporary life. Often

It takes a lot of strength to display vulnerability in a hostile world. Shantel Wetherall spoke to artists who are taking that risk

Of the hundreds of works in the National Gallery of Victoria’s recent blockbuster Triennial, one piece stopped me in my tracks. Hannah Brontë’s immersive video work Eye Hear U Magik enveloped onlookers in a tender, ethereal story of women’s knowledge, passed down through generations.

How brave it was for Brontë to refuse the opportunity to be formidable, and instead make her most ambitious piece to date a deep exploration of her culture, spirituality and femininity. I stood for a long time, reflecting on the importance of Black artists claiming space to showcase tenderness – particularly in this moment of history.

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Ian Flintoff and Teresa McDonnell on notions of beauty, age and women in response to an article on Kate Winslet

Gaby Hinsliff (Kate Winslet shows there’s more to middle age than a saggy belly, 3 June) raises a question of massive importance to women, but also to us all. It is a myth that humans are less beautiful as they age – on the contrary. Years ago, to help me to understand things better, I got a season ticket to a Rembrandt exhibition. Many hours, day after day, taught me that, with the more truthful eyes of the artist, age is an etching of beauty on the more stereotyped images that are thrust upon us by adverts, pin-ups and porn. If the rosebush had eyes, it would peer at any human with wonder and exclaim: “How can anything of such wonder, beauty and complexity possibly exist?”

An analogy I often use is of the flashy cover on the latest novel in a bookshop, comparing this with the patina, beauty and handcrafting of an antique volume in a museum. Things – and people – lose beauty with age? No! The opposite is the case by any other than the most superficial standards of self-interest.
Ian Flintoff
Oxford

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The event, spread out through the city’s dealerships, brought a model tried elsewhere to one of the sector’s major capitals.

A new exhibition in Amsterdam reconstructs personal histories to confront the Netherlands’ extensive and little-discussed involvement in the international trade of enslaved people during the colonial era.

A black line unfurls across four white walls, its loops accumulating into tangled human figures. Some appear to embrace; others lunge at each other’s throats. It is impossible to tell where one form

Twelve years after a powerful earthquake devastated L’Aquila, in central Italy, the building’s inauguration is a sign of recovery. But there is still work to do.

The question: “How Will We Live Together?” The answers: Pavilions that resemble science-fair projects, conflict-resolution sites and flights of fancy.

His portraits of his Paris neighbourhood summed up its residents’ anger. Now his subversive installations straddle borders, float on boats and envelop favelas. We speak to the elusive artist

“I didn’t spend enough time in school for any of the teachers to remember me. The only role models I had were the guys in the neighbourhood doing graffiti,” reflects JR, on his journey from street-smart tagger to world-famous conceptual artist. “I guess what’s nice is now, at 38, I can tell my mother I am not a vandal but an artist.”

The career trajectory of the first-generation Frenchman, who refuses to publicly reveal his real name, has been fascinating to observe. With a mother from eastern Europe and a father from Tunisia, JR grew up on the wrong side of the Périphérique, a ring-road that acts as a barrier between the middle-class districts of central Paris and the concrete jungle of project buildings on the city’s outskirts that are home to a largely immigrant population. “It was tough, but there was always such a great sense of community,” he says from a plush art studio that’s only a few minutes away from the Parisian grave of Jim Morrison. “Doing graffiti meant that I had to have eyes in the back of my head. Even today, I am always naturally looking around [for the police].”

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Intimate letters, record-breaking sales and the world of competitive gardening paint a fascinating picture of the story behind Vincent’s floral masterpieces

Not surprisingly, Vincent van Gogh has proved a rich seam for the Exhibition on Screen gallery series, with one of the most commercially potent of modern painters providing material for previous films including Van Gogh in Japan and Van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing. Here, the attention is even more micro, though hardly niche: the series of sunflower studies Van Gogh painted in 1888 and 1889, one of which went on to command a record auction price in the mid 1980s and practically on its own send the art market into the financial stratosphere.

Super-familiar though the sunflower paintings may be, this film does a pretty good job of drilling down through the intricacies of the series, from Van Gogh’s earlier “Paris” set, and then the seven pictures he painted in Arles, which provide varying versions of the famous flower-vase arrangement. The film takes us carefully through each of the pictures, showing them in situ and giving the curators the chance to chat, rather like the epic Leonardo tour the same producers released in 2019. This film, though, has the chance to dwell a little longer, sketching in biographical information and offering readings from Van Gogh’s own letters to fill out the artist’s thinking. There’s also an interesting insight into the “competitive gardening” of the era, and the sunflower’s place in it: Oxford University’s Stephen Harris offers a more enthusiastic explainer than you normally get in films like this.

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Crusading architect Terry Farrell is helping fund an ‘urban room’ in Newcastle – giving the public more control over what is built in their city

What if negotiating the planning system were as easy as popping to the shops?

At the moment, if you want to know what developments are planned for your street or city, you have to look out for a flimsy sheet of laminated A4 paper tied to a lamp-post. From there, an obscure reference number will lead you to a byzantine website where, if you’re lucky, you might be able to download a jumbled series of PDFs that contain, in the abstruse language of planning application drawings, what is actually being proposed.

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Rachel Armstrong, from Northumberland, is due to graduate from the renowned Russian academy this month

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Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder expands to a new exhibition space in Vienna, which will be inaugurated with installation works by the American artist Sheila Hicks. The gallery will

‘’For me is not interesting to show what it’s there, for me it’s interesting to show what’s also there. The subtext. I try to see what’s behind the people around me. What’s behind the surface.’’ Says

Ida Ekblad is one of the most recognized artists of her generation working today. Her artistic practice comprises a variety of mediums such as painting, sculpture, performance, video, record production,

John Cassidy, the creator of the bronze memorial to the Bristol slave trader, produced radical and evocative work, writes Simon Casimir Wilson

It is perhaps a little ironic that a professor of public history at the University of Manchester should dismiss, and in the Guardian moreover, the sculptor John Cassidy’s now notorious statue of Edward Colston as a “mediocre piece of late-Victorian public art” (‘A potent historical artefact’: the statue of Edward Colston’s new role, 4 June).

Cassidy (1860-1939) was a Mancunian sculptor, whose Victoria jubilee fountain adorns Albert Square and whose masterpiece, the allegorical group Adrift, is a prominent feature of St Peter’s Square. It represents, he wrote, “the dependence of human beings upon one another, the response of human sympathy to human needs”.

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Artwork in building slated for demolition faces uncertain future, though city has pledged to save it

It all began one February night in 1989. Cesar de Melero was DJing in the Ars Studio club in Barcelona when someone told him that the artist Keith Haring was outside but the doorman wouldn’t let him in.

“The place was packed, so I put on a record and pushed through the crowd,” De Melero told the Guardian. “And there he was with his saintly, innocent face and I told the doorman to let him in and I said to the boss: ‘Champagne for Keith Haring.’”

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The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, opening in September, has redesigned its galleries amid social movements like Black Lives Matter.

British Museum, London
This Roman blockbuster features relics from the great fire of AD64 and invites the visitor to judge the emperor’s true nature

Fiddling while Rome burns is a hard charge to dislodge. Nero did nothing, or he played the violin (so I was taught as a child), while the city went up in flames. Blaming Christians for the fire, he had them burned alive in pits, before building a giant golden palace on the ruins. He also murdered his mother, brother, two of his wives and much of the Roman elite.

The only surviving accounts of Nero (37-68 AD) – by Tacitus and Suetonius, near-contemporary historians, and Cassius Dio in the second century – are almost unanimously hostile. A teenager put on the throne by his scheming mother, Agrippina, Nero is greedy, violent and homicidal. In addition to fratricide, matricide and uxoricide, he is even guilty of the unusual crime of “urbicide”, having set fire to Rome himself.

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Liam Curtin says lack of maintenance has left Blackpool High Tide Organ in a poor condition

An artist is calling on council officials to take down his most famous work after claiming that a lack of maintenance has left it in a poor state and a threat to public safety.

Liam Curtin’s Blackpool High Tide Organ was constructed along the town’s new promenade in 2002. Commissioned by Blackpool council and designed by Curtin and John Gooding, the structure is primarily made of Corten steel – the same material used for the Angel of the North sculpture.

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Somerset House, London; Kingston upon Thames
The lofty words on sustainability from designers from around the world in London are given more concrete form further up the Thames

First, let me defend a dead white man. The 18th-century architect William Chambers was not, as the designer Es Devlin suggests, a tree-hater. He designed Kew Gardens, wrote treatises on gardening and said that “gardeners, like poets, should give a loose to their imagination and even fly beyond the bounds of truth”. He may or may not have been reprehensible in other ways, for example when he was an employee of the Swedish East India Company, but on the charge of arboriphobia he is innocent.

It’s true that he didn’t want any trees in the imposing classical courtyard of Somerset House in London, which he designed, a fact that has provoked Devlin to install a temporary Forest for Change, the centrepiece of the London Design Biennale. Four hundred trees have been installed, which will later be permanently planted in London boroughs. Here, you can wander its winding paths and hear birdsong from round the world, part of a soundtrack by Brian Eno. The project has been realised with the support of the film-maker Richard Curtis and has some of the feelgood vibe of Love Actually and Notting Hill.

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The Italian artist may have wanted to brush Beatrice Hastings out of his life, but artifical intelligence has thwarted him by enabling a re-creation of the work

No one wants to be reminded of a failed relationship by having the ex’s portrait hanging around. After Amedeo Modigliani and his lover, Beatrice Hastings, broke up, the Italian artist is thought to have obliterated her memory by painting another woman’s likeness over his portrait of her.

So he might not be too happy to learn that science has now brought back that “lost” portrait, using artificial intelligence, an X-ray and 3D-printing to re-create the painting, with full colour and textured brushstrokes.

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Things are beginning to get back to normal, but in other ways everything has changed

I’m gazing at the sea again. I don’t know when I started – when I pulled up that website with the photos of beaches, with the package deals and local attractions, and the pastry thing that you can only get in one particular village that must be reached by boat. I don’t know when I started, but in the time since I did, evening has come. When I think about holidays my brain splits neatly in two, one half dreaming and planning, memories paddling alongside fantasies, while the other half remains typically livid and confused, and quite at sea – though not in the good way.

It has become boggling to me, the idea that, once, I was able to simply plan a break. That our lives have now been so neatly delineated it’s possible to mark time as BC or AC, the before Covid period now remembered as a simple cruise through tree-lined boulevards, caressing strangers (consensually), laughing in offices, high-fiving (constantly). And now, well. Even the things that haven’t changed have changed, our own new, raw eyes seeing them in ungenerous and terrible lights.

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This memorable shot of a civil rights protest in Memphis was taken by Ernest Withers, later revealed to be an FBI informant

One of the early civil rights marches down Main Street in Memphis, Tennessee, was for fathers and daughters only. It was hoped the presence of young girls might reduce the chance of violence against protesters. In later life, Renee Andrewnetta Jones, who was eight months old at the time of this famous picture, looked back on the events in which she had been an unwitting participant. She had grown up to become a paediatrician in Memphis.

“To my understanding, my father, William Edwin Jones, made the sign himself,” she said. “He was a tall, stately man and as the police approached us, they had these intimidating looks, but my father wasn’t a man to be intimidated. A year after the picture was taken he was selected as one of the first black foreign service officers in the United States, posted with his family to Nigeria.” She had never forgotten the emotional force of the sign itself. “I always try to live without any boundaries,” she said, “because that is the way we were raised.”

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Heritage charity says many ‘renovated’ monuments are filled with cement, not water, so can’t quench thirst or help reduce plastic pollution

They were a much-loved feature of London life for over a century, ever since the first of hundreds of public drinking fountains opened in 1859 at St Sepulchre-without-Newgate church in the City.

At its peak, thousands of people a day were drinking from it and Charles Dickens observed that “300,000 people take advantage of the fountains on a summer’s day”, although some preferred to drink beer for fear of polluted water. But now, London’s few remaining historic fountains are under threat, with some local councils filling the fountain bowls with cement rather than water – ensuring that no one will ever be able to quench their thirst at their taps again.

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Peder Lund is proud to present nine painted bronze sculptures by one of the most widely influential and important artists of his generation, Paul McCarthy (1945- ). This is the gallery's second time

Exhibition date: 26 August – 26 September, 2021.

In a previous group show, amidst works by Schirin Kretschmann and Yorgos Stamkopoulos, Baldo Diodato covered the gallery floor with an immaculate canvas so that visitors’ foot traffic acted as an

Will Eades is an award-winning photographer based on the mid north coast of NSW. His mission is to see and capture spectacular moments in nature, and to share these rare moments with others. A self-taught Nikon shooter, Will’s main focus is on storms and other weather phenomena as he strives to be present when the elements align for a great photograph

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