The photographer turned painter specializes in images of Black female solitude, luxuriating in the importance of relaxing

As a painter, Danielle Mckinney has just one subject: Black women in moments of repose. From that singular basis she has managed to produce years of acclaimed artwork, developing an enviable style that has drawn the attention of, among others, Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Her new show at Marianne Boesky Gallery, titled Quiet Storm, offers 12 works that suggestively combine elements of exhalation and simmering intensity.

Hold your Breath, one of the displayed works, is as good a starting point as any, with its alluring subject sitting atop a mere suggestion of a chair, a long cigarette perched between two fingers and a gorgeous burnt orange robe draping languorously over her body. The slight upturn to her head offers a sense of absolute restful satisfaction, and the olive green background seems the perfect complement to the subject’s mood. All in all, the painting comes together with a simplicity and precision that is seductive, and that holds the eye.

‘This was taken in Qaanaaq, one of the world’s most northern cities. It gets 24-hour sun during the summer months. I went because my name originates there’

In the summer of 2023, I was living in Qaanaaq, Greenland, one of the most northern cities in the world. It’s a tundra: there are no plants, it barely rains and, in the summer months, there are 24 hours of sun. During the night, the weather is calmer and more colourful – by day, it’s hardcore and very bright. This was taken just before midnight. I could hear kids playing tag outside, then they got tired and lay down. I went out and asked if I could take a photo. We have a lot of nostalgia in our culture in Greenland, and this photograph captures that feeling: it is the middle of summer, but it has the look of spring. Greenland in spring is unlike any other place. Since the sun is not visible in the winter, when spring comes it brings life back. That time of total darkness is very spiritual.

The whole town knew I was taking photographs, but the fact that they’re now going be on show at the Danish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale isn’t so interesting to them – it’s too far away. My work has always been about Greenland’s history, traditions and everyday life, such as hunting. I was given permission to take photos with the hunters, but it was difficult to shoot where they work because the ice was melting.

Orlando Whitfield was a student when he became best friends with Inigo Philbrick, ‘the art world’s Bernie Madoff’. He talks about how their decade of hustling would lead one to a breakdown – and the other to jail

• ‘The day we tried to bag a Banksy’: read an extract from Whitfield’s explosive exposé

Orlando Whitfield is a youngish man, shy, with a reddish beard. His hands are aggressively tattooed, as if they’d been laid, backs down, on wet newspaper. The ink is a form of armour, he says, like his pranking brand of humour (for a while his iCloud hotspot was “Lord Lucan’s iPhone”). But he’s earnest, too, quick to draw on a literary quotation. Today he has arrived at lunch apologetic and soaked through, having been caught on his bike in a downpour.

We’ve met at the Academy Club – his choice – an old-timers’ haunt in Soho, London, with black oilcloths on tables and stained wainscotting. “Hogarth’s dining room,” he calls it. We’re here to discuss his former best friend Inigo Philbrick , the London-based American art dealer who swindled friends, business associates, investors and collectors out of millions of dollars before going on the run in 2019. Philbrick, 36, was jailed in 2020. In 2022 he was sentenced to seven years for wire fraud and ordered to forfeit $86m (£68m). A stunned art world is still puzzling over how he pulled off this heist. The maître d’ brings a fan heater to dry Whitfield’s jeans.

An exclusive extract from Orlando Whitfield’s explosive book about the $80m art fraudster

• ‘The money is not real – it’s a feckless level of wealth’ – read an interview with Orlando Whitfield

To be a good art dealer you need to be both prescient and manipulative. The mere ability to spot a trend or an artist is not enough. You have to know how to get what you want from the situation, to buy early and hold your nerve. That I never had this instinct can be evidenced by the fact that when I went to the British street artist Banksy ’s Christmas pop-up, Santa’s Ghetto, in December 2004, I bought two prints for £100 each. I took them home, stuck one on my wall with drawing pins in the full glare of a south-facing window, and the other I promptly lost to the murky gods of the underbed. Today, in good condition, those prints would be worth upwards of £150,000. Each.

When I told Inigo [Philbrick] this story he almost fell off his chair laughing. The art world at the time cared little for Banksy and I suspect the feeling was mutual. Inigo, however, sensed opportunity. One afternoon in the autumn of 2007, he emailed me an image of a pair of metal doors. The email contained no text but the subject line read, “Call me when you’ve seen this.” At first I was confused. The doors looked ordinary, grubby. The photo was blurry but when I zoomed in I noticed at the bottom of the door on the left what appeared to be a Banksy rat wearing a baseball cap and holding a beatbox on its shoulder.

When Mikko Takkunen relocated to the Chinese city from New York he felt the urge to capture its vanishing essence

Archie Moore’s meticulous genealogy, kith and kin, is a memorial to Indigenous lives lost – but it’s also about global common humanity

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For the past two months, in the quiet, darkened room of the Australia pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Bigambul-Kamilaroi artist Archie Moore has been drawing by hand in chalk a vast and meticulous genealogy.

But Moore’s work, kith and kin – Australia’s official entry in the 2024 Venice Biennale, which opened this week with the theme “Foreigners everywhere” – is about much more, and its grand scope reveals itself slowly.

The artist’s nightmare of colonial exile, ecology and globalisation – recurring endlessly over six interconnected video installations – leaves you unsettled, unhinged and gasping for air

Trucks pass by spewing clouds of insecticide that fumigate a poor neighbourhood. A small child, stoic and resigned, gets the treatment too. A carriage clock and an old watch drown on a riverbed, along with old master drawings and paintings distorted by the rills in the stream, and avuncular 1970s TV ecologist David Bellamy explains global warming in some old degraded footage. A container ship founders, its cargo shifting. Sound and image do all the work in John Akomfrah’s Listening All Night to the Rain , which fills the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale. I was there two hours and still feel I’ve only seen snatches, the story constantly slipping away from me and leading me on, via continual swerves and jumps and shifts, from moment to moment, screen to screen and room to room. Overwhelmed, I’m left gasping.

As soon as the eye settles on one thing, we are swept away again. A man sleeps beside pictures of boy soldiers. One of them once might have been him. Jellyfish rise through water in green light, and a white woman in pearls and gloves waves from a car at dutiful crowds of black faces. A man waits at a lonely bus stop in the Scottish highlands beside a road sign warning of otters crossing. How do we go from here to images of Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, before his assassination? A waving placard tells us that colonialists are doomed.

Why are there almost no tears in great works of art? Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli is rectifying this – by embroidering balloon-shaped drops on to modern mashups of Giotto and Botticelli

Since tears express intense emotion, you’d think great painters would have fallen over themselves to depict people crying. Wrong, says Francesco Vezzoli. “Just Google books about tears in art,” says the Italian artist via video call. “There aren’t any. There are some tears in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, but that’s an extreme painting. You should find tears on the face of Christ, but that happens only once.” This is in Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo, from 1475. “Go to the Kunsthistorischen Museum in Vienna: no tears. In European religious paintings, there should be tears on the faces of every saint because they all died for martyrdom. But tears are very rare.”

To correct this remarkable oversight, over the past 15 years Vezzoli has embroidered tears on to reproductions of paintings by great Renaissance artists from Giotto to Botticelli and Lotto. Sewing has been long part of Vezzoli’s practice: he used to frequent a needlepoint shop called Creativity while at Central St Martin’s in London in the early 1990s (when he wasn’t clubbing, that is, or writing his dissertation on homoeroticism in Brazilian soap operas).

The artist, who has died aged 93, spent her life battling white male dominance, in the gallery and beyond. Her work foregrounded Black American experience with a raw and unforgettable power

When New York’s Museum of Modern Art reopened in 2019 after a radical rehang, its most headline-grabbing display placed Faith Ringgold’s American People Series #20: Die eye to eye with Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. For years, MoMA had been criticised for its shocking gender imbalance and lack of diversity. Ringgold was among the feminists to protest about the museum in the late 1960s, but it would be decades before it paid attention. The museum’s permanent display told a story of modern art imagined as a sequential progression driven almost entirely by the work of white men. In 2019, that started to change.

Painted 60 years apart – Picasso’s was completed in 1907, Ringgold’s in 1967 – the pairing of Die and Les Demoiselles invited a different kind of storytelling, one that acknowledged the debt of influence Picasso owed African art, the influence he in turn exerted over generations that followed and the rich complexity that might emerge from acknowledging plural art histories.