The affordability crisis hitting New York's arts scene has had some predictable results - galleries have shut and artists have left the city - but less foreseeable was the move into the real estate business by an Ivy League institution.

Students from the Yale School of Art, which counts Mickalene Thomas and Kehinde Wiley among its alumni, would once have been expected to head to New York when they graduated but its dean Kymberly Pinder told the Financial Times the university noticed more were staying in the area as they could not afford the city's rising rents.

She said college fees were like a "ball and chain of debt" for graduates wanting to launch artistic careers so the school had decided to take matters into its own hands, adding: "So one of my next projects is to try to work with Yale and local developers to create subsidized studios."

Pinder has also raised around $11 million in a bid to set up an endowment fund to pay student tuition fees and another $2 million could be raised next week when Yale teams up with Sotheby's for an auction of work by artists including Thomas and Richard Prince.

The Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has announced plans for a $100 million transformation.

It includes a new 40,000-square-foot museum building designed by Japanese architects Kengo Kuma & Associates, the renovation of the existing museum, and the expansion of its Chadds Ford campus into a 325-acre park with 10 miles of trails bookended by the two buildings.

A museum spokesperson said half the funds had been raised already and construction would start next year and be finished in time for the new building to open in 2029.

The museum near Philadelphia first opened in 1971 and traces its beginnings to a campaign to conserve the area's natural beauty in the face of proposed industrial development.

It includes a significant collection of work by artists including NC Wyeth and Andrew Wyeth who lived and worked there.

It will be Kuma's first museum building in the United States, but the firm previously designed Tokyo's Suntory Museum of Art and the Besancon Art Center in France.

Around 250 concrete slabs from the Berlin Wall have found an unlikely new home in a Florida university.

The remains of the wall, which divided communist East Germany from democratic West Germany, were shipped to the United States for safekeeping decades ago and are now owned by a Florida doctor Jack Jawitz.

The slabs, which are often heavily graffitied on the western side, are 3 feet tall, 10 feet wide and about 4 inches thick and were originally stacked on top of each other in threes so each section was about 9 feet high.

Javitz told local radio station WUSF he had decided to give them to New College Florida in Sarasota which would display them for the public to see.

He said he had regarded himself as a caretaker of the wall rather than its owner, adding: "I'm out of my comfort zone. I'm a physician. I don't know the first thing about what to do with the wall, so my first inclination is to find a partner, and I found New College, and they embraced the idea."

Chinese-Canadian sculptor Xiaojing Yan is one of the winners of an environmental arts prize for her use of fungi in her work.

She covers life-sized wooden busts of women in mushroom spores which are then left to grow on the surface of the sculptures.

Yan was one of five winners of the Canadian Rewilding Prize, which rewards artists who work on "restoring and revitalizing our connections with nature", drawn from more than 650 entries.

She told the Globe and Mail newspaper the resulting figures were "suspended between a human and a fungal life" and represented her own dual identity.

1 - An exhibition of portraits by fashion photographer Steven Meisel is going on show at Photo London next week. The event opens to VIPS next Wednesday in its new home in Olympia in the west of the city and runs to Sunday.

2 - A blaze broke out while workmen were dismantling San Francisco's Vaillancourt Fountain after debris inside the sculpture's welded steel tubes caught alight. The brutalist landmark, made by Canadian sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, is being dismantled and removed as part of the renovation of the city's Embarcadero Plaza.

3 - New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is opening its doors to the city's teenagers next Friday. The annual Teens Take The Met! event features performances, a dance party, and a podcast recording and is free to all teenagers aged 13 or older with a middle school or high school ID.

4 - Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli has won Spain's 2026 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. The studio, whose hit films include Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, will receive a Joan Miro sculpture and $58,000 prize money.