Lose yourself in Anish Kapoor’s black holes while Horrible Histories’ illustrator visits Preston and Margate hosts Tracey Emin’s students’ graduation show – all in your weekly dispatch

Anish Kapoor
If you are looking for a summer blockbuster, here’s your show – Kapoor’s exhilarating spectacular boasts black holes and a mountain over your head.
• Hayward Gallery, London, until 18 October

Just over 50 years after she was one of the first Black artists to have a solo show at the Whitney, the museum gathers some of her most remarkable paintings for a new exhibition

Surprisingly, the term “outsider art” was coined fairly recently – in 1972, when the art historian Roger Cardinal made it the title of the book with which he introduced the idea to the English-speaking world. Since then, debates have raged as to whether it’s really justified to use such a term to describe art made beyond the confines of the art world, and if any of the other competing terms – among them naive art, folk art and raw art – are really any better.

The Whitney Museum of American Art’s new show, The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans, offers audiences an opportunity to contemplate just how its subject may – or may not – have been an outsider to the art world, and to also revel in Evans’s increasing insiderness in the decades since her death in 1987. A comprehensive retrospective with nearly 100 pieces covering the entirety of Evans’s artistic output, the show occurs almost exactly 50 years after the Whitney first introduced the artist’s genius to New York’s art elite.

Art of international significance planned for £17m redevelopment of museum whose closure sparked uproar

Works by Tracey Emin, Steve McQueen and Olafur Eliasson have gone on display at a new contemporary art gallery and museum in north-east England which aims to show works of international significance.

The Light is a £17m redevelopment of a museum in Durham that closed 10 years ago to local uproar.

Exhibition at Charles Dickens Museum in London looks at writer’s holiday pursuits, from Kent to the Isle of Wight

It’s summer in the city, the pubs are crowded, and the coast beckons. In a year that has so far brought five significant heatwaves, it is a fair description of the current holiday season.

But the same was true, too, of the much less frequent hot, dry summers of the past, including 186 years ago when Charles Dickens put pen to paper in anticipation of escaping London for the sea breeze in Broadstairs, Kent.

Before he was an irascible TV pundit, the Irish midfielder was equally feared on the pitch. Irish painter Seánie Harte has documented all the times Keane was sent off playing for Manchester United. ‘It’s a bit of fun,’ he says

Across his career in the 1990s and early 2000s, Roy Keane, the Ireland and Manchester United footballer, was a widely decorated midfielder with a relentless will to win. He also had his share of controversies, which included being famously sent off on several occasions.

These have now been documented in Irish painter Seánie Harte’s Red Card series, which marks the 11 times Keane received his marching orders while playing for Manchester United.

Sayuri Ichida and her sister used to be distant – until their mother died. This exhibition traces their close relationship through sun, wind and snow

Turn the Volume Up! at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University highlights the activism of everyday people who have confronted injustice. New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, quoting the Bronx rapper KRS-One’s song Turn The Volume Up during his election-day victory speech inspired the name of the exhibit. Featuring work by artists such as Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems and the Guerrilla Girls, the show examines how protests and collective action can create and inspire social change

• Turn the Volume Up! opens on 27 August and runs through 11 July 2027

Dulwich Picture Gallery show to feature British artist’s work hung next to paintings by Dutch and Flemish greats

The contemporary UK artist David Shrigley will apply his trademark arch humour and distinctive artistic practice “in dialogue” with old masters of Dutch and Flemish painting in a major new solo exhibition in London.

The celebrated visual artist will explore the 17th-century paintings with his own new works “responding to” and hung alongside original masterpieces by artists including Jan Steen, Adriaen Brouwer, David Teniers the Younger, Adriaen van Ostade, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Rembrandt van Rijn.

From the early days of computers and the internet, Wendy McMurdo has let tech infuse her photography. Now, in her largest exhibition yet, she looks at its impact on the future generation

Tackling grief, time, parties and spaceflight, the Scottish artist uses film stills, magazine ads, family photos and even her own furniture to create a show you can settle into and figure out

‘I love parties,” says France-Lise McGurn, “but they’re complicated, and there’s a time when you leave.” Her new show at Dundee Contemporary Arts, called The Charm Offensive, carries her dynamic, vital paintings into a new era – and on an unprecedented huge scale. Grappling with grief, the passing of time, and the paradoxes and slippery truths of modern womanhood, the work chases the desire to be present, balancing the fun of the party with the melancholy of leaving it.

McGurn was born and raised in Glasgow and studied painting in Dundee, so this show is something of a homecoming. As a student, she lived three doors down from DCA. Although she knows nostalgia can be a “dirty word” among artists, McGurn says that “a melancholic grappling with the past is part of painting”. She has always worked from extensive source material, but for this show, she has allowed that archive of images to be visible to viewers.

Creating homes for Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant and Lucille Ball made Williams a star. A trio of new exhibitions shows he belongs among the 20th century’s greats

When you fly into the Los Angeles airport LAX, a spindly space-age contraption is the first thing that greets your eyes outside the window. Built in the early 1960s, the Theme Building – which once attracted travelers to its in-house restaurant, designed by Walt Disney Imagineering, towering above airfields – was built by a supergroup of architects whose structures helped define the city’s midcentury aesthetic: William Pereira, Welton Becket, Charles Luckman and Paul Revere Williams.

Of these architects, Williams, the first licensed Black architect in California, arguably shaped the contours of Los Angeles most deeply. In the six decades before his death in 1980, Williams completed an estimated 3,000 structures ranging from single-family residences, commercial buildings, affordable housing projects, the Los Angeles county courthouse, a reimagining of the now-razed Ambassador hotel and opulent homes for celebrities including Frank Sinatra, Barbara Stanwyck and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Perhaps most iconic of all is the Beverly Hills hotel; Williams led its renovation, and its recognizable curlicued sign is scrawled in Williams’s own handwriting.

Using ‘equestrian embodiment’, photographer Ayana V Jackson celebrates great horsewomen who galloped through prejudice
• The best of Arles 2026 – in pictures

Edinburgh art festival erupts with Del LaGrace Volcano, Belgium lays down a marker for public art and Toulouse-Lautrec captures a dancer – all in your weekly dispatch

Edinburgh art festival
Science-minded artist Katie Paterson finds a natural home in the Collective Gallery’s repurposed observatory on Calton Hill, while Del LaGrace Volcano, Eva Rothschild and more show in the many other memorable places this city can boast.
• Edinburgh venues until 30 August

The artist’s latest swerve sees her creating an alien inflatable landscape for New York’s Balloon Museum

Oversized inflatable blades of grass graze my face as I wind a path through the glowing white gallery space. Little papery squares of snow blow, some sticking to my hair. The path through the room curves so that only what is right in front of me is visible: initially, it seemed like I would reach the far side of the room in mere seconds but still my journey, magically, continues. I am at Snowy/Windy/Spring on Planet Z, the latest installation by the performance artist Marina Abramović. It opened earlier this month at New York’s newly opened Balloon Museum, which bills itself as “the first permanent home for inflatable art”.

“I’ve never done anything like this in my life,” a smiling Abramović said, speaking on Zoom from her Manhattan apartment. “But if you give me an assignment then I’ll try to see what I can do with it.” As she began researching balloon art her first thought was that it was “so kitschy – basically for kids and games”. However, the more she contemplated the balloon, the more she saw its resonance with her own practice. “You put air in it, and at some point the air comes out. Or you pinch it and it disappears. The temporality of this is very close to what I’m doing: performance art.”

Second world war paintings and sketches show novelist ‘engaging with her world in a new light’

For decades, they lay in a secret room in her attic gathering dust. Now, newly discovered artworks by the Booker prize-winning author Iris Murdoch – including the only self-portrait she is known to have painted, four surrealist landscape paintings and three sketches of female nudes – will go on display for the first time on Friday.

The artworks were created at the start of the second world war when Murdoch was a student at Oxford. They expose her early interest in surrealism and fascination with the naked female form.

From dazzling shifts in perspective to astounding tricks using shade, reflections and rain, these winning images from the Pure Street Photography awards all capture ‘marvellous moments of fleeting serendipity’

In the heart of old Ljubljana, a mannequin with a bucket on its head welcomes visitors to a new and ambitious project – a museum focusing on the varied and sometimes antagonistic humour of the former Yugoslavia

On the main promenade along the river that runs through Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital, tourists stop to photograph a mannequin with a bucket on its head. Dressed in a pistachio jacket and red leggings, the figure sits at a table in front of one of the houses in the historic Old Town, staring at a spilled cup of Turkish coffee, popular with Slovenes and with the other Balkan and central European citizens with whom they shared a country, until it collapsed in the early 1990s. A large sign in the background reads: “Bullshit Museum: The world is off the rails, and so are we. Yebiga!”

Yebiga, which can be loosely translated as “fuck it”, or “screw it”, is the red thread running through the museum that was launched in May and consists of five small rooms filled with mannequins wearing odd accessories, AI-generated images of laughing characters and scenes accompanying some of the jokes, framed or displayed on cardboard screens. The word encompasses the heart of Balkan humour, says the museum’s founder, Borut Kokelj, who wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “What part of yebiga don’t you understand?”

Exhibition in Port Talbot is part of project exploring how communities experience endings and transitions

Margaret Heggett, 95, does not remember a time when Port Talbot was ever quiet. Born and raised in the shadow of the steelworks, with a father, brother and husband who worked there, she never imagined what the town could look or sound like without its blast furnaces.

“I’m not saying it was beautiful, but there were jobs. We did know the closure was coming and we have to move with the times but it’s affected the town a lot and it’s very sad,” she said.

Independence anniversary | Vertical drinking | Thomas Paine’s Thetford roots | Andy Burnham and Larry the cat | Larkin about

John Crace was underwhelmed by the British Museum’s parlous four-item exhibition to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence (Digested week, 7 August). Perhaps next time he should instead visit the British Library, whose free exhibition on the American Revolution in its Treasures gallery includes the original stamps from the 1765 Stamp Act, letters from combatants, maps and more. It even brings the story right up to date with banners invoking the revolution used in recent No Kings protests against Donald Trump.
Joan Lock
York

• In West Sussex, we stand with Simon Jenkins (I stand to defend vertical drinking. Is a pub that doesn’t allow it a real pub at all?, theguardian.com, 7 August). One of the local pubs in Lindfield is named The Stand Up Inn. It is said that a local employer built it without seats to ensure his workforce did not spend too long refreshing themselves. Currently it has seating for the weak-hearted drinker.
Elaine Fear
Horsted Keynes, West Sussex

Now on its 167th edition, the Royal Photographic Society’s annual show features moving explorations of kinks, visual disorders … and long-snouted clowns