Since a reckoning brought awareness to problematic statues across the country, the road to replacing them has been slow and arduous

After nearly half a decade, Vinnie Bagwell, a self-taught sculptor-artist, is still waiting for the million dollars that the New York City department of cultural affairs promised for her to work on monument Victory Beyond Sims, after winning the artist competition to replace the monument of Dr J Marion Sims in 2020.

“It just requires a lot of diligence and perseverance,” she said to the Guardian. “A lot of times, people don’t realize how important and impactful art in public places is until they see it.”

Raye wowed with her old-Hollywood glamour, Pulp did 90s nostalgia at its best and everyone tried to hide from the heat – see the best Guardian photography from a big Saturday

The sun hit hard on Saturday until late afternoon, and proved too much for some people.

Festivalgoers struggle in the heat by the Other stage. Photographs: Alicia Canter

Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new building has been a decade in the making and has long vexed critics, but its CEO hopes to turn things around

As Los Angeles county’s new $720m art museum building nears completion, it’s still haunted by a single, vexing question: how do you hang art in a gallery where every single wall is made of massive slabs of concrete?

Designed by Peter Zumthor, a prizewinning Swiss architect, the new building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) has sparked controversy in the art world since its initial designs were made public in 2013.

As Mr Doodle, Sam Cox found a global audience and made a fortune with his signature scrawls covering furniture, clothes – and eventually an entire house. But behind the scenes, he was unravelling into psychosis

From the road, it’s barely visible; glimpsed, maybe, if peered at with cheeks pressed against the property’s imposing iron gates. There is otherwise little out of the ordinary in this quiet Kent corner of London’s affluent commuter belt – St Michael’s has a village hall, a country club, a farm shop. But at the end of a snaking, hedge-lined driveway is an incongruous home: a sprawling, six-bedroom neo-Georgian mansion, almost every inch, inside and out, covered in the trademark black-on-white line drawings of its owner, Mr Doodle, the 31-year-old artist Sam Cox.

A car honks twice behind me. A woman in her 80s steps out. “It’s mindblowing, isn’t it?” Sam’s grandmother Sue says, eyebrows aloft. “And terribly … different.” The gates ahead buzz open. “Take it slowly,” she offers, by way of warning. “You’ll want to give your eyes a few minutes to adjust.”

The Moroccan photographer intended this portrait of his sister, taken during the Covid pandemic, to bring optimism in uncertain times

Ismail Zaidy took this image, with the help of his siblings, in the gardens of the famous La Mamounia hotel in Marrakech. The Moroccan photographer received special authorisation to shoot there in 2021, when Covid restrictions were in place. He took his brother, Othmane, as shoot assistant and his sister, Fatimazahra, was the model in the image, wearing a vintage dress their mum had bought at a flea market. The small team fixed flowers to a plastic sheet and took a number of shots over a three-hour period; Othmane appeared in some, too.

Zaidy recalls what a treat it felt to be outside. “Getting access to open spaces was limited, so being outdoors – even briefly – felt refreshing and special,” he says. “ It was a fairly chaotic period for all of us, but over time things calmed down and we found a rhythm. It actually gave us more time to create together.”

From Van Gogh’s starry skies to the nocturnal workings of Louise Bourgeois and Patricia Highsmith, sleepless nights have long inspired heightened creativity. Could those artistic impulses actually help us to sleep?

I can’t remember when I first stopped sleeping soundly. Maybe as a child, in the bedroom I initially shared with my brother, Tariq. I would wait for his breathing to quieten, then strain to listen beyond our room in the hope of being the last one awake, and feel myself expanding into the liberating space and solitude. By my early 20s, that childhood game of holding on to wakefulness while others slept began playing out against my will. Sound seemed to be the trigger. It was as if the silence I had tuned into as a child was now a requirement for sleep. Any sound was noise: the burr of the TV from next door, the ticking of a clock in another room. When one layer of sound reduced its volume, another rose from beneath it, each intrusive and underscored by my own unending thoughts. Noise blaring from without and within, until I felt too tired to sleep.

The artist Louise Bourgeois suffered a bad bout of insomnia in the 1990s, during which she created a series of drawings. Among them is an image that features musical notes in red ink, zigzagging across a sheet of paper. They look like the jagged score of an ECG graph that has recorded an alarmingly arrhythmic heartbeat. It sums up the torment of my insomnia: there is a raised heartbeat in every sound.

The truce between Israel and Iran, protests in Nairobi, wildfires near Athens and the summer solstice at Stonehenge: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

• Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing

As a season of events celebrates the life of the city’s most famous son, Dale Berning Sawa revisits the region central to his art, where she, too, grew up

When I was 12 years old, my parents moved my sister and me to Aix-en-Provence, the birthplace of and inspiration to Paul Cezanne. In truth, Cezanne had nothing to do with their choice of destination. But his mountain was the one thing my father knew of the region. He was three years into a four-year fine art degree (he painted portraits of the two of us daughters for his finals), steeped in painting and its history.

When we landed at Marignane airport in nearby Marseille on 29 August 1989, a wildfire was ravaging the Sainte-Victoire, that celebrated mountain subject of so many of Cezanne’s works. In the tumult of the days that followed – our family unhoused, the mountain unrecognisable – my father hustled between estate agents with the sound of sirens ringing in his ears. “Cezanne must be turning in his grave,” he remembers one saying.