Francis Kéré’s design for the Serpentine, via The Guardian

The Serpentine Galleries will host architect Diébédo Francis Kéré (founder and head of Kéré Architecture) as this year’s Serpentine Pavilion designer, making the architect the first African designer invited to work with the British Institution’s annual project.  Kéré, who splits his time between Berlin and his home city of Gando in Burkino Faso, has created a massive elevated canopy, much like the stretching branches of a tree, under which the Serpentine will host its annual series of talks, performances and other events.   (more…)

A rendering of Lumen by Jenny Sabin, via Archinect

The Ithaca-based Jenny Sabin Studio has won this year’s edition of the MoMA Young Architect’s Program with her design Lumen, a robotically-knitted canopy made from photoluminescent textiles that both absorb and diffuse light.  The work, which is made from recycled materials and also features a misting system, will hang over the courtyard of MoMA PS1 this summer, as the museum embarks on its annual Warm Up concert series.   (more…)

The Royal Academy of Art has embarked on a partnership with over 60 London Galleries to rebrand the Mayfair Art Weekend with a three-day calendar of exhibitions and events.  “Our aim is to open up our schools, the collection and our buildings and make them all more accessible to the public,” says Kate Goodwin, the RA’s curator of architecture. (more…)

Paper Magazine has a piece on painter Alex Becerra, as he prepares new work for the LA Art Book Fair this week.  The artist, who works out of a 1,700 square foot studio in Inglewood, gives the magazine a tour of the space as he discusses his work and the the U.S.’s current political climate.  “My studio is a creative hub, not for this kind of politics,” he says.  “My attitude hasn’t changed, it is more of a question of how can I stay positive in these times.” (more…)

Artnet examines the market for Raymond Pettibon, as the artist’s New Museum retrospective renews interest in his dauntingly massive body of work.  “Pettibon’s works are extremely collectible,” says Alexander Berggruen, specialist for post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s. “They brilliantly tread the line between house-able and viscerally pleasing, while also irreverent, provocative, and challenging in many others ways.” (more…)

The New Yorker has a piece this week on various museums’ gestures of resistance against the Trump White House, including rehangs of work to emphasize foreign artists, and a seven-hour reading of Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” at the Brooklyn Museum.   (more…)

The Gurlitt Art Trove will finally go on public view at the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland and the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany, the New York Times reports.  The collaborative exhibition will focus both on the Gurlitt collection and more broadly on themes of looted art in Europe.   (more…)

A rare set of Old Master Drawings is set to go on view at London’s National Portrait Gallery, including sketches and pieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, Rubens and Rembrandt.  “Some of the drawings were perhaps never intended to leave the artists’ studios, but are arguably among the most engaging and powerful impressions of personal likeness in the history of art,” says Director Nicholas Cullinan.  (more…)

The Guardian has a piece this week on Claude Monet’s fascination with the foggy landscapes of London, and the city’s enduring influence on his work.  “Without fog London would not be beautiful,” he once claimed. (more…)

Nathalie de Gunzburg, chairwoman of the Dia Art Foundation’s board in Manhattan, is featured in this week’s edition of NYT’s new ‘Show Us Your Wall’ series, touring the paper through her collection of classic minimalist works, and reflecting on the era’s initial impact on her.  “I always thought that it looked like New York — rigid, sometimes imposing, very muscular. But I have to say that living with it in a place like this city actually calms me,” she says. (more…)

France’s culture ministry has launched a new prize dedicated to female contemporary artists, the AWARE awards.  “Invisible for too long, put in the background, ignored, women artists must find in the 21st-century their place in all the artistic disciplines,” French culture minister Audrey Azoulay said in a statement.  The first winners of the award are Laetitia Badaut Haussmann and Judit Reigl. (more…)

A 100% cut to the arts budget in the city of Bath has led to calls for intervention by the UK Culture Secretary.  “The council has committed an act of cultural vandalism in Bath that will result in a new dark age for arts and culture in the region,” says Equity deputy general secretary Stephen Spence. (more…)

The failure to purchase a £30 million painting for the National Gallery and prevent it from leaving the UK has resulted in calls to reform the country’s art export rules, the Guardian reports.  “Today’s news that Tom Hill, the American buyer of Pontormo’s Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap, has refused the National Gallery’s matching offer of over £30m marks a great cultural loss to the nation,” says the Art Fund’s Stephen Deuchar.  “We believe the UK’s art export control system should serve our public collections more effectively than at present.” (more…)

The Guardian reports on the current state of public art in the UK, often supported by private estates and new building projects rather than the public organizations of previous eras, and looks at recent efforts by artists to use public art to engage these problems.  “We questioned the capitalist logic of the proposed development,” says artist Jessie Brennan of a recent work on public land in Peterborough, “and offered alternative evidence for the current social use and value of the land.” (more…)

Jean-Luc Moulène (Installation View), via Art Observed

To walk through Jean-Luc Moulène’s retrospective at The Centre Pompidou is to traverse through a wasteland of fossils and discarded matter, a history of repurposed and spliced objects placed into an ever-evolving series of dialogues and interactions.  Giving off subtle senses of a dystopian, simulated future, the artist’s sculptures play on a suspended sense of reality, often challenging its role as constructed object or sourced material that plays on a rupture between past, present and future, disrupting easy legibility while staging a site where these divergent sensations are allowed to co-exist. (more…)

Anish Kapoor’s swirling, watery void Descension is set to go on view at Brooklyn Bridge this summer, courtesy the Public Art Fund.  “Anish Kapoor reminds us of the contingency of appearances: our senses inevitably deceive us,” says Public Art Fund Director and Chief Curator Nicholas Baume says.  “With Descension, he creates an active object that resonates with changes in our understanding and experience of the world.” (more…)

Aline Kominsky-Crumb and R. Crumb, Drawn Together (Installation View)

Drawn Together, a decade-spanning look at the collaborative work of the cartoonist husband and wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb and R. Crumb, offers a well-timed opportunity for lovers of the graphic arts at David Zwirner, coinciding with the opening of the New Museum’s Raymond Petitibon retrospective A Pen of All Work.  Although they were individually prominent artists in the graphic arts scene during the course of their careers, Aline and Robert delivered a unique visual and intellectual body of work that both drew on their marriage in the early ‘70s. Later gathered in a series titled Aline and Bob’s Dirty Laundry Comics, which debuted in 1974, the couple’s ongoing collaboration is a statement on marriage, partnership, and dependency, as well as on sexuality and gender roles of the society they lived and worked within. (more…)

Jannis Kounellis, via Art Newspaper

Greek-Italian Arte Povera pioneer Jannis Kounellis has passed away in Rome at the age of 80, according to the Italian Minister of Culture.  “It is a sad day, Kounellis has left us. A master, Italian by adoption, who left a mark on contemporary art,” Minister Dario Franceschini tweeted today. (more…)

After only nine months at the Brooklyn Museum, Nancy Spector is returning to the Guggenheim as both chief curator and artistic director, the New York Times reports, a role that will see her expand on the museum’s projects globally.  “Because we’re multi-sited and that’s growing, it seemed to me like the institution really needed a discriminating synthesizer, and Nancy was interested in that and I think really the best person for it,” director Richard Armstrong says. (more…)

Yayoi Kusama is the subject of a profile in the Washington Post this week, as the artist continues to paint and design new pieces.  “I’m old now, but I am still going to create more work and better work. More than I have in the past,” she says. “My mind is full of paintings.” (more…)

Adrian Ghenie, Rest During the Flight into Egypt (2016), via Art Observed

Drawing on a wide range of works from the artist’s recent practice, Pace Gallery is presenting a series of new paintings by Adrian Ghenie, drawing on the artist’s unique approach to both the construction of his canvases, and the position his work takes in its relation to broader timeline of European painting and political history.

Adrian Ghenie, Degenerate Art (2016), via Art Observed

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David Hockney’s early lithograph Fish and Chips Shop, which hung for years over the fryers at Sea Catch fish and chip shop in Eccleshill, West Yorkshire, will sell at Christie’s in London next month, expected to bring £6,000 to £8,000.  “There is something wonderful about a local chippy with a rare Hockney hanging above the fryer,” says Murray Macaulay, the auction house’s head of prints.  (more…)

The Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig, Germany, has announced the discovery of a rare drawing by Rembrandt, which had sat in its collection unnoticed for almost 250 years.  The drawing of a dog is one of only a few known works by the artist depicting animals in that medium.   (more…)

Widespread lay-offs at auction startup Paddle8 have left the company “gutted” by some reports, as many departments are now run by a single staffer.  The news comes after the company’s split with Auctionata, with little information provided about either company’s next steps. (more…)