Jenna Mayilema Lee has mapped out a career as an award-winning artist with a little help from the unsuspecting British Museum.

The Australian artist picked up the $10,000 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Art Award for work on paper for a series of traditional Aboriginal bags made entirely from maps taken from the London museum.

Lee said she first had the idea while living in the UK and noticing the museum suggested a £2 donation for their maps guiding visitors to objects gathered through what she described as "colonial systems of extraction".

Writing on Instagram, she said: "I chose not to donate. Instead, I began taking the maps, knowing they would one day form a body of work. When the idea started to take shape, I contacted friends still in London and asked them to take small stacks too, without donating, and smuggle them back to Australia for me."

The amount given to 15 different artists each year by the Joan Mitchell Foundation. This year's fellowship awards were announced today with Krista Clark and Dianna Settles reportedly among the US-based artists chosen.

What shall we do with the drunken soldier? For staff at the Mauritshuis art museum the answer was to paint him back into a picture after more than two centuries' absence.

Conservators at the museum in The Hague in the Netherlands restored him to his rightful place in Pieter de Hooch’s 17th-century A Man Smoking and a Woman Drinking in a Courtyard after he was removed sometime around 1822 leaving only a couple in the image.

It is not known why he was painted out of the scene, but fortunately for the museum they had a copy of the original painted by de Hooch and in the collection of Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art to guide their work.

Work by 13 photographers will speak for a century of Mexican photography in a new show at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

All the pictures, including images by the likes of Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide and Flor Garduno, were donated to the museum by collectors Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser over the last 25 years.

The show runs from September 1 to January 3.

1 - California's San Diego Museum of Art has laid off 11 employees with "rising operational costs" given as the reason. Chief operating officer Kari Kovach told the city's Union Tribune newspaper "the current landscape" had made the museum rethink its plans.

2 - Works by John Chiara, Lee Ufan and Jack Whitten are among 118 pieces acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art in the last six months. That includes a gift of 64 works from Constance R. Caplan, a former chair of the museum's board, whose collection was seen in a 2020 show at the Art Institute of Chicago.

3 - William Dobson's 17th-century self-portrait is going on a tour of England inspired by the painter's own life. The work, currently on show at Tate Britain in London where he was born, will travel to locations including the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford where he became court painter to King Charles I.

4 - A biography of Australian photographer Max Dupain has won a $17,600 literary award. The book by photography curator Helen Ennis was announced as the winner of this year's 2026 Australian National Biography Award ahead of a major show of his work opening at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney this month.

5 - Elvira Dyangani Ose has been named artistic director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. She takes over at the South African museum on October 1 replacing the late Koyo Kouoh who held the role for six years until her death last May.