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In the 15 years since his 81-day detention by China’s Ministry of Public Security, artist and dissident artist Ai Weiwei has explicitly addressed the harrowing experience in his work. This summer, he will do so again, in what will likely be the most demanding presentation to date. As part of his site-specific exhibition called “Button Up!” at Factory International’s Aviva Studios in Manchester, England, Ai will present Sewing a Button , a 24-hour performance piece in which he will reenact his detention. The performance will activate a re-creation of Ai’s cell, which measured 7.2 meters by 3.6 meters (about 23.6 feet by 11.8 feet). Sewing a Button , scheduled to start at 5 p.m. on July 3 and running until July 4, will take place the day after the opening of “Button Up!” on July 2. Visitors will be able to book two-hour slots, as well as a full 24-hour ticket that allows them to come and go, to see the performance. (Some of the footage will also be broadcast online.) Sewing a Button ...

Hundreds of paintings lost to the ravages of war—including multiple works by Peter Paul Rubens, Paolo Veronese, Anthony van Dyck, and Caravaggio—will soon be viewable online courtesy of a digitization initiative by Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. The museum’s formidable collection of Old Master paintings was damaged by two fires around the end of World War II. But as reported by the Art Newspaper , digital renderings made from high-resolution glass negatives from a photo-documentation campaign started in 1925 are bringing the works back to life, in a way. “The losses have long represented a major gap in the visual record and in attribution, provenance and conservation research,” according to TAN . But records by way of the glass negatives—most of them made by the German photographer Gustav Schwarz, as part of an ongoing process related to new acquisitions that continued until 1944—stand to make the works accessible. “They have tremendous documentary value—not only for the museum and the ...

Above: Trytime for Ories in their one-point Anzac Day win over Pōneke in 2015.  Saturday’s fourth round of the 2026 Swindale Shield will be the fifth time that club rugby has been played on Anzac Day since our records began in 2002 (Anzac Day also fell on a Saturday in 2001 but we don’t have...

Mexico City’s Museo Anahuacalli is set to receive more than 150,000 objects from Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera, the grandson of Diego Rivera, in a donation that significantly expands the museum’s holdings and renews attention on the artist’s original vision for the site. As first reported by  The Art Newspaper , the gift spans centuries, from 16th-century ceramics to textiles, photographs, wooden objects, prints, and archival material tied to Rivera and his circle. The works will be transferred in stages over the coming months, beginning with ceramics and followed by manuscripts and correspondence, with completion expected by the end of the year.  Coronel Rivera, a photographer and art historian, spent more than four decades assembling the collection. It brings together pre-Hispanic objects, family documents, and works from his own career, though it does not include paintings by Rivera or Frida Kahlo.  Speaking to the Art Newspaper , Coronel Rivera said the collection h...

Johnsonville beat the Wellington Axemen in frightful conditions at home at Helston Park in their third round Swindale Shield and Mick Kenny Memorial Cup match. Johnsonville scored two first half tries, to first-five Niall Delahunt and to fullback Jacob Walmsley, and then kicked a penalty on halftime to lead 15-3 at the interval. A second...

James Hayward, a West Coast painter whose abstractions earned him a loyal cult following among artists, died on April 16. He was 82, according to a brief obituary posted by his studio over the weekend. Hayward may not be among the most well-known names to emerge from the postwar period, but many artists knew and loved his work. Mike Kelley, for example, once praised him as “one of the few truly important West Coast painters.” His process was marked by a certain eccentricity that differentiated his art from a lot of similar work. From the mid-1970s onward, Hayward largely produced monochrome abstractions. But where many single-color canvases from the era were characterized by the smooth, even application of paint, Hayward purposefully left his materials chunky and thick. Referring to the phrase “monochrome abstraction,” Hayward told Artillery of his work, “People ask what does that mean—you know, lay people? I say, well basically I make one-color paintings of basically nothing.” A...