Exhibitions Newsfeed

Their scandalous work was once banned. Now it’s in museums. The photographer talks about a lifetime defying conformity – and their ‘very active’ sex life

The peaceful Swedish city of Örebro is not where you might expect to find Del LaGrace Volcano, the US photographer known for their subversive images depicting LGBTQ+ communities, drag kings and sexual desire. Yet this is the place they have called home for the last two decades, having moved with their ex-partner, Matilda Wurm, an associate professor at the city’s university. Now, their days are punctuated by walks around a nearby forest and trips to the local outdoor swimming pool with the pair’s two children. It is a far cry from the life Volcano previously had in London, where they lived in squats, attended S&M fetish parties and documented lesbian cruising culture.

“I do miss it. I think London will always be my city,” Volcano tells me when they pick me up from my hotel in Örebro’s (virtually empty) city centre. Halfway between Stockholm and Gothenburg, the former trading hub – known for its medieval castle – is “not a queer city”, the photographer admits. Most of their neighbours don’t even know they are queer. Volcano, 68, is intersex and calls themself a “hermaphrodyke” – but these days they “pass as apparently a little old man”, they say with a grimace.

Exclusive: Analysis offers ‘smoking gun evidence’ that overturns previous assumption that bronze age individual was male

The Upton Lovell Shaman, a bronze age individual who has been depicted in museum exhibits as a bearded spiritual leader and metalworker, was female, an ancient DNA analysis has revealed.

The 4,000-year-old skeleton, along with the extensive collection of stone axes, metalworking tools and the remains of an elaborate ceremonial cloak found in the grave, is viewed as among the most significant bronze age burials in Britain.

We Go Way Back opens at the Francis Crick Institute on 16 July

Sixty years after its first staging, performance artist MPA is restaging the provocative piece in Los Angeles

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, a traveling retrospective on view at Los Angeles’s The Broad museum, features black and white footage of Ono’s 1965 Carnegie Hall performance of Cut Piece projected on to one of its walls. It was a landmark event in performance art history, in which the artist, aged 31, sat motionless on the stage as strangers took turns with a pair of scissors to cut away pieces of her clothing. As an emblem of the Fluxus artistic tradition, Cut Piece “relies on the audience’s actions to complete the performance”, says Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibitions manager at The Broad. This is precisely the work’s inherent risk: it leaves the artist’s body totally vulnerable to the viewer’s unpredictable whims. Consequently, as Ono herself told the art historian Ina Blom in a 1992 interview, “It is a frightening piece to perform.”

The tension in the footage is palpable, particularly as Ono struggles to retain her composure while a young man snips away at the straps of her undergarments. But as Loyer points out, “Looking at documentation of Cut Piece in the gallery, we are a step removed.” In order to convey the full impact of the piece, the museum is staging Cut Piece live twice at the Redcat theater on 18 and 19 July to be performed by the Los Angeles based artist MPA.

From scientific tricks to stop turtle traffickers to stranded seals and displaced workers, these images all scooped prizes at this year’s Earth Photo awards

Tate Modern, London
This exhibition makes nothing of the Cuban-American artist’s controversial death – instead it focuses on the astounding way she left an imprint of herself on the earth using blood, feathers and gunpowder

A huge colour photo of a ruined ancient site greets you outside Ana Mendieta’s engrossing exhibition and it immediately tells you this is going to be different. It’s the kind of thing that seems to belong more to a British Museum show about a lost pre-Columbian civilisation than in the concrete citadel of Tate Modern’s Blavatnik wing. Yet in her imagination, that’s where Mendieta belonged, too. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, she was sent to the US when she was 12 to flee the revolution. She felt like an outsider among white Americans. Home, for her, was the past, and she would excavate the very origins of art and mythology.

Mendieta made art from blood, feathers, flowers and sand and in such fresh ways you’d think these primeval substances were new inventions. She literally played with fire, drawing a human figure with gunpowder on the ground or on the trunk of a tree, then setting it alight. The flames leave behind a scorched shadow of a person, like the victims of a nuclear bomb or the dead of Pompeii entombed in ash. Confronted by a row of these burnt ghosts emerging from real tree trunks you almost expect them to speak to you like the shades of the dead.

Gallery director says collection of 140 paintings will offer a more balanced view of Manchester painter’s work

A new exhibition of work by LS Lowry will “bust a few myths” about the Mancunian artist, who the show’s co-curator says is still wrongly derided for being “naive and uncultured”.

LS Lowry: the Theatre of Life features 140 paintings by the artist, who captured working-class life in the industrial north-west of England during the early and mid 20th century.

Medieval artwork safely delivered to British Museum before going on display from September in tightly controlled conditions

• Bayeux tapestry crosses Channel in dead of night

The Bayeux tapestry has survived myriad perils, from cathedral fires to its potential destruction for use as wagon covers. Now, with the embroidery about to be displayed in a blockbuster London exhibition, experts must contend with a host of more insidious dangers.

The arrival of the tapestry at the British Museum in the small hours of Friday morning was a historic moment – albeit less dramatic than the landing of William the Conqueror it portrays.

Tate Modern hosts a major exhibition of Ana Mendieta, Constable turns 250 and the accidental beauty captured by unattended online cameras – all in your weekly dispatch

Ana Mendieta
Neolithic monuments inspired this Cuban-born American artist to create her ephemeral, raw, poetic works that embrace nature in a truly original way.
• Tate Modern, London, from 15 July to 17 January

Cloak-and-dagger operation delivers 70-metre medieval artwork to British Museum, as gathered diplomats applaud

Like the man whose conquest of England almost a millennium ago it recounts, the Bayeux tapestry crossed the Channel in the dead of night, in as much secrecy as possible, landing on the country’s south coast early the following day.

The artefact’s arrival on Friday marked the first time it has returned to England in nearly 1,000 years, and British Museum staff will begin to prepare it for exhibition during its year-long loan.

This month Bronx Documentary Center is hosting the ninth edition of the Latin American Foto Festival, on view in New York from 9 to 26 July. The show brings together the work of photographers exploring social, environmental and political issues from across Latin America and the Caribbean

V&A Dundee
When Kathryn Findlay and Eisaku Ushida joined forces, a sensual kind of architecture was born – resulting in a hairy blue pod in Tokyo and a starfish beach palace in Qatar

‘The future of architecture,” pronounced Salvador Dalí on meeting Le Corbusier in 1922, “will be soft and hairy.” Fast forward over 70 years to Tokyo, and his surrealist prophecy was the stimulus for the Soft and Hairy House, one of a series of startlingly expressive dwellings designed by the talented Scottish-Japanese architectural partnership of Kathryn Findlay and Eisaku Ushida. Melding diverse design cultures – Celtic coiling and Japanese “rawness” – overlaid by an interest in the natural world, as well as fractal geometries and chaos theory, the pair contrived a uniquely sensual and surreal architecture.

Completed in 1994, the Soft and Hairy House was based on a classic courtyard plan form, radically reworked for pre-millennial Tokyo, its softness accentuated by plumply rounded contours, its hairiness by a shaggy fringe of greenery embellishing the roof. A bright blue, porthole-percolated bathroom pod intruded into the courtyard like a giant fungal entity. The interior was suggestive of the glamorous dream space of a Hollywood star, with soft draperies and seductive lighting.

The iconic photography festival is back for the 57th time with images of dogs, diners, UFOs and more

Not for the faint-hearted, this is the first large-scale presentation of the Australian artist’s anti-Vietnam war, hallucinatory works since the late 60s

On a fine day, the bushland surrounding Bundanon Art Museum is sunbathed and effortlessly resplendent. Inside the gallery, visitors are confronted with a surreal landscape charged with horror and anguish; nightmarish and fantastical visions of a figure wandering through a wilderness, tortured by fire and transformed into a clawed and feathered beast; crouching, contorted, on all fours.

The hallucinatory paintings by the Australian artist Arthur Boyd chronicle the downfall of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar: a conqueror punished by God for his hubris, sentenced to seven years’ exile and insanity, living as an animal in the wilderness. Boyd embarked on the extraordinary series while living in London in the late 1960s, drawing on his horror at the Vietnam war and a series of protests involving self-immolation. The myth and modern context proved fertile territory for the artist, spawning about 100 paintings, pastels and drawings, and spanning to the 90s.

As the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum turns 50, an expansive exhibition celebrates how art has coincided with space

Wearing a shiny silver spacesuit, Alan Shepard clutches his helmet and looks like an archetypal blue-eyed American hero. The 1961 portrait by Bruce Stevenson paid tribute to the first US astronaut in space. It also planted a seed.

James Webb, the then administrator of Nasa, saw the painting and was inspired to start the space agency’s own art programme, believing that artists could bring a unique perspective to exploring the cosmos. From 1962 to 1974 it was led by James Dean, who then became the first art curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Readers respond to an article by Jonathan Jones on great medieval art apart from the Bayeux tapestry

Jonathan Jones (Never mind the Bayeux! Here’s some other great medieval art – and it’s free, 30 June) says that medieval art came to Britain with the Normans after having pointed out, probably correctly, that the tapestry was almost certainly embroidered by Kent women. These women were almost certainly Anglo-Saxon, and their husbands may well have died at Hastings.

The quality of this English embroidery was widely known across Europe before 1066 and it was often called Opus Anglicanum – English work. The creators of the Bayeux tapestry were probably forced by Odo of Bayeux to create it by the sort of compulsion that often characterised Norman rule in England. The article goes on to quote alternative sights due to the Normans, which are almost entirely architectural.

Rye spies a quirky summer show, Leonora Carrington’s surrealism is knowingly Freudian and ancient reptiles take over the Natural History museum – all in your weekly dispatch

The Air of Ideas
Artists represented by Kate MacGarry Gallery escape to an 18th-century house in East Sussex for this quirky summer group show, including Lisa Milroy, Marcus Coates and Francis Upritchard.
• 30¹/₂ High Street, Rye, until 31 August

Plymouth retrospective of artist, who died in 2018, aims to ‘champion and celebrate the power of the imagination’

She spoke about indulging in colour, feasting on beauty, feeling a little giddy when drinking in glorious hues and textures – and not searching too deeply for meaning.

So in these gloomy times, a major retrospective of the work of the artist Gillian Ayres in her adopted Devon homeland may be just the job.

A new exhibition follows the unlikely route of tarot cards all the way from 15th-century Italy to its association with the occult now

Once the territory of bohemians such as Pamela Colman Smith – an intimate of William Butler Yeats whose art won the admiration of Alfred Stieglitz – and mystics such as Aleister Crowley (among other things, inventor of his own religion), the tarot has now gone mainstream. Searches for how to do tarot readings soared during the pandemic, and decks are proliferating at a dizzying pace – your local independent bookstore probably sells at least a dozen of them.

It’s never been easier to get a reading – or at least a quick card pull – and the Morgan Library & Museum’s new show, Tarot!, capitalizes on the practice’s increasing popularity to lure in the curious and knowledgable alike. Tarot! starts by charting the cards’ evolution from Renaissance Italy up through the 21st century, then offers up the tarot-themed work of more than two dozen artists – among them Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, as well as new art by the celebrated British painter Chris Ofili.

The Dutch photographer believed mastering colour was the sign of a truly skilled artist – and pioneered an influential style best described as ‘organised chaos’

Want to see some old wonders but don’t fancy forking out £33 for 40 minutes with a tapestry? Our critic celebrates the British treasures you can see all year round – from monstrous crypt carvings to the vaulting glory of our cathedrals

There’s a carved stone character grimacing furiously in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral and you can see why – a man is sitting on his head, legs apart, holding a fish and bowl in outstretched arms. Other figures perched atop slender stone columns include a creature with a serpent’s tail wrestling a dog-like monstrosity, a gryphon eating a siren, and a (now-detached) carving of a horned devil. All this nefariousness in the depths of England’s holiest shrine.

But then medieval British art is full of wonder, mystery and humour. It is also so abundant that it gets taken for granted. But now, after almost 1,000 years, it is about to have a moment. This week, the rush will begin to get £33 tickets to spend 40 minutes in the company of a medieval British artwork. The Bayeux Tapestry, a 70-metre embroidery depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066, was almost certainly embroidered by Kent women to a commission by Bishop Odo of Bayeux in the 1070s.