The fifth edition of London Gallery Weekend takes place this weekend, and opens as the global art market is at a low ebb. So what can it do to change the mood? Ben Luke speaks to Ananya Mukhopadhyay, the managing director of Ames Yavuz, which is opening a new London gallery to coincide with the weekend events, and Jeremy Epstein, co-director of the Edel Assanti gallery, who is the co-founder and co-director of London Gallery Weekend. In 2018, a devastating electrical fire tore through the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro with catastrophic consequences. This week, it will temporarily reopen some of its galleries. The museum’s director, Alexander Kellner, tells The Art Newspaper’s digital editor Alexander Morrison about its steady rise from the ashes. And this episode’s Work of the Week is a miniature portrait of Jane Austen by an anonymous 19th-century artist. The work belongs to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which this week opens the exhibition A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250. The show is co-organised by Juliette Wells, Professor of Literary Studies at Goucher College in Baltimore, and she speaks to Alexander Morrison about the portrait.

London Gallery Weekend, 6-8 June. Simon Lehner: Of Peasants & Basterds, Edel Assanti, 6 June-22 August; Polyphonies, Ames Yavuz, London, 6-26 June.

The temporary reopening of the National Museum of Brazil continues until the end of July.

A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 6 June-14 September

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We visit major museum projects unveiled this week in London and New York: Ben Luke takes a tour of V&A East Storehouse in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which offers unprecedented access to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection. He meets the deputy director of the V&A, Tim Reeve, and speaks to key members of the team that are making this radical museological vision for London a reality: the museum’s lead technician, Matt Clarke, its senior curator Georgia Haseldine, and Kate Parsons, the director of collections care and access. The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Americas, Ben Sutton, visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which this week unveiled its revamped Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. The wing holds the Met’s collections of work from Africa, the Ancient Americas, and Oceania. Ben talks to Alisa LaGamma, the curator of African art who is in charge of the Rockefeller Wing, and the Papua New Guinea-born, Brisbane-based artist Taloi Havini, one of a number of contemporary artists who created new works for the the project. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Down and Up (2024-25) by Rachel Whiteread. It features in a new show of Whiteread’s work, the first at the Goodwood Art Foundation, a not-for-profit contemporary art gallery and sculpture park in West Sussex, UK. Ben Luke talks to Rachel about the work.

V&A East Storehouse, London, opens 31 May.

The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art New York, reopens 31 May.

Rachel Whiteread, Goodwood Art Foundation, West Sussex, UK, 31 May-2 November.

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A host of exhibitions and events this month and next celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, one of the godfathers of kinetic and auto-destructive art. Ben Luke speaks to Roland Wetzel, the director of the Tinguely Museum in Basel about the artist’s life and work, and the events marking the centenary. In Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Fenix, a museum about migration, has just opened, featuring a dramatic stainless steel tornado form on its roof. We discuss the museum with its director, Anne Kremers. And this episode’s Work of the Week is by an immigrant artist, Ben Shahn, who was born in modern-day Lithuania but travelled as a child to the US, where he became a leading painter associated with Social Realism. Among his greatest achievements was the mural The Meaning of Social Security, painted between 1940 and 1942 in Washington D.C. to reflect the benefits of the then-recent Social Security Act. Shahn is the subject of a major show that opened this week at the Jewish Museum in New York. We speak to Laura Katzman, the co-curator of the exhibition with the Jewish Museum's Stephen Brown, about Harvesting Wheat (1941), Shahn’s study for one of the figures in the mural.

The Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland, has a permanent display of his work; Scream Machines–Art Ghost Train, by Rebecca Moss and Augustin Rebetez, Tinguely Museum, until 30 August; Mechanics and Humanity: Eva Aeppli and Jean Tinguely, Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany, until 24 August; Niki de Saint Phalle & Jean Tinguely: Myths & Machines, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton, UK, until 1 February 2026; Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hultén, Grand Palais, Paris, 20 June-4 January 2026.

The Fenix museum is open now.

Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity, Jewish Museum, New York, 23 May-12 October. The book accompanying it published on 3 June by Princeton University Press, priced $45.00/£38.00.

The Meaning of Social Security murals:

https://art.gsa.gov/artworks/637/the-meaning-of-social-security?ctx=3bc918796c456cc8fb8e3d3f033918d4249d0ce6&idx=6

https://livingnewdeal.org/sites/wilbur-j-cohen-building-shahn-frescoes-washington-dc/#lg=1&slide=1

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