“The act of hand weaving and dyeing cloth is extremely labour intensive – it can take months to make one piece,” says British artist Ptolemy Mann, who has been creating textile works of extraordinary colour and vibrancy for nearly 30 years. In 2021, after a period of experimenting with painting on paper, she turned her brush to her painstakingly dyed and handwoven cloths – the striking results can be seen in Mann’s first monograph, Thread Painting (published 9 May, Hurtwood Press) , and a solo show at Cromwell Place, London (15-19 May) . “There’s something radical about taking a precious handwoven cloth and applying a wet, loaded paint brush to its surface,” she says, noting that most traditional paintings are done on woven (albeit plain) canvases. “People are astounded that I am willing to take the risk. They love the madness of them.”

The Renaissance master dazzles, Rasheed Araeen goes for drinks and Peppi Botrop really mixes media – all in your weekly dispatch

Michelangelo: The Last Decades
Passionate and confessional drawings by one of the greatest artists of all time.
• British Museum, London, from 2 May until 28 July

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.

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.

Painting by Graham Sutherland is being displayed at Blenheim Palace before being auctioned in June

An intimate study of Winston Churchill that has been in private hands for seven decades has gone on show in the room at Blenheim Palace in which Britain’s most famous prime minister was born, before being auctioned in June.

It was the work of Graham Sutherland, one of the most highly regarded artists of his time. Sutherland was commissioned to paint Churchill by the Houses of Parliament to mark the wartime leader’s 80th birthday in November 1954.

Sutherland’s portrait of Churchill will be on public view at Blenheim Palace from 16-21 April, and at Sotheby’s in London and New York before its sale.

Academics, artists and curators delve into the background behind Sargent’s glossy society portraits in this polished documentary

With impeccable timing, as the show it explores is still running at London’s Tate Britain, here is an appreciation/profile of the American painter most famous for his brilliantly rendered portraits of the late Victorian and Edwardian upper crust and nouveau riche. The art world being what it is, the film takes its cue as much from the similarly themed Sargent exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (with whom the Tate has co-produced the show); an institution that has its own significant claim to Sargent via the spectacular murals commissioned for the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts itself.

Such is Sargent’s commitment to reproducing the shimmering wonder of the fabrics in which his subjects are often draped, it’s fair to say that “fashion” might be a valid, if clickbaity, way in. It has not proved universally popular, however, with the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones describing the Tate exhibition as “horrible … [with an] obsessive, myopic argument”.

Claire Douglass’s giant vista of ‘late-stage capitalism in frightening times’ features many city notables, including Joe Lycett clutching a carrier bag

If you look hard, in a Where’s Wally kind of way, at artist Claire Douglass’s fabulous painted imagining of Birmingham street life, you will find our guest editor, Joe Lycett. He’s in a rainbow-coloured coat, clutching a Tesco bag. Speaking about Douglass’s last large-scale canvas – that one a distinctly Brummie take on Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights – Lycett suggested he was more than thrilled to have been included in the latest depiction of his home city. “I was a fan of Claire’s before this happened,” he said, “but I am so proud of the fact that I’d been considered part of this community and culture.” And, not least, “because that is basically what I am doing most of the time, wandering around in a faux fur, carrying a plastic bag”.

Douglass’s painting, Souvenir from the Anthropocene , will be included in this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. This photograph of the work was taken in Douglass’s studio in Erdington, north-east of the city centre. The painting captures something of the defining character of Birmingham, which Lycett describes as “never pompous, or self-regarding”. The work started out, Douglass says, “as a simple look at our working lives,” but it has evolved “to become a tableau of late-stage capitalism during frightening and turbulent times”. She imagines her paintings with a distant future audience in mind, trying to learn the ways in which we lived and worked, before climate catastrophe altered our world for ever. “That’s why,” she says, so much of her time has been spent “depicting the minutiae of litter in the streets, protest signs and cleaning tasks. I’m not even sure this is art any more,” she says, “I think it might be historical illustration as epitaph.”

Technician, 51, who hung his own picture in an exhibition about art world glitches, has been sacked and given a three-year ban

The first picture that greeted visitors to the first-floor exhibition space in Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne gallery on 23 February may not have immediately grabbed their attention.

The 60cm by 120cm artwork was a retro-looking photograph of a family of four, with the background and parts of the faces and bodies roughly painted over in white. It was unassuming compared with the video- and photo-based artworks in the adjacent rooms, but only on closer inspection might visitors have wondered why there was no label giving the artist or the work’s title.

Expressionism, sculpture, video: the art world is so vast and varied it can be difficult to know where to start, even with its biggest names. Our writers suggest the one piece that can help you understand masters old and new

On 26 April 1937 the Basque town of Guernica was bombed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe and the Italian Legionary Air Force. Picasso, a Spanish artist settled in Paris, paid homage to the killed with this cubist history painting. Moments of revelation punch through the jagged mayhem to hit your heart. The baby cradled in a screaming mother’s arms hangs its head upside down, eyes blankly open, mouth obliviously gaping: it is dead, you realise as if for the first time. Picasso asks in each line of this figure what a child’s death means. He poses similarly agonising questions across the canvas: what does it feel like to be the woman in the burning house, arms outstretched to a God who is not showing any mercy today? And how does the universe permit the pain of that screaming horse, its newspaper body pierced and eviscerated? So long as this painting exists the bombing of Guernica will never end but will always be this infinite moment of wrong. Jonathan Jones
See it at: Museo Reina Sofía , Madrid