The belated-but onward march of indigenous art shows no sign of halting with the news the world's richest woman has just bought a huge chunk of contemporary work to put on show in America's museums.

Alice Walton, heiress to the Walmart retail empire, bought 90 works from the collection of John and Susan Horseman with nine of them going to her Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.

The other 81 were acquired for her Art Bridges Foundation where they will be accessible as long-term loans to museums across the US free of charge.

Among the artists whose work is included are Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Rick Bartow and T.C. Cannon.

The rise in interest in once-overlooked artists has been seen in every corner of the art world in recent years from auction houses to public institutions. The main exhibition at last year’s Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, shone a light on once-ignored communities while Australian Aboriginal artist Archie Moore won the Golden Lion award.

London's Tate Modern is currently showing an exhibition of work by Aboriginal Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray which has wowed the critics and includes several loans from US comedian and collector Steve Martin.

At the age of 85, Larry Bell has undertaken his largest ever public art project - in New York's Madison Square Park.

The sculptor, who emerged from the Los Angeles-based Light and Space movement in the 1960s, is presenting two works made specifically for the park with four other recent sculptures, two of which are previously unseen.

They will be on show for nearly six months from September 30 to March 15 and feature his trademark vibrantly colored cubes which will subtly change as the Manhattan light shifts across the days and seasons.

The number of years Andrew Wyeth spent painting and sketching views of the Kuerner Farm only a couple of miles from his childhood home and studio in Pennsylvania. Some of his almost 1,000 paintings of the farm are on view at the Brandywine Museum of Art until September 28.

Tributes paid by museums and musicians reflect the breadth of work undertaken by stained glass artist Brian Clarke who died earlier this month aged 71.

Former Beatle Paul McCartney was among those paying tribute to the man he described on Instagram as "a dear friend".

He wrote: "Ever since I met him in the 70s with Robert Fraser the art dealer, we always had the best times together. We will all miss him but have fond memories of him to cherish and his incredible artwork to remind us of Brian himself."

Clarke designed the set for McCartney’s 1989-90 world tour as well as the covers of several albums and dedicated a major eight-panel stained-glass work to Linda McCartney.

Jasmine Allen, the curator of the Stained Glass Museum in Ely in the east of England where Clarke was a trustee for many years, said his influence could not "be understated".

She said: "Brian was a passionate advocate for the art of stained glass – and he continuously pushed working with both glass and lead in new innovative directions. I remember vividly seeing his glass for the first time and it instantly transformed my perceptions of what contemporary stained glass could be. His exhibition held a few years ago at the Newport Street Gallery was aptly named – for we have indeed lost ‘A Great Light’."

Writing in the Financial Times, design historian Tanya Harrod called Clarke the pre-eminent artist in a genre barely recognized in the art world, lamenting “there seems no obvious heir to his ambitious genius”.

A set of ancient oak stakes thought to have been part of a 2,000-year-old bridge in London is at the heart of a new installation in the city by Jane and Louise Wilson.

The sisters have used high-resolution microscopic imagery of the wood’s grain as inspiration for the work which uses screen-printing, resin, and carved wood and is on show from Thursday.

The timbers were discovered during excavations for Bloomberg’s headquarters in London and the installation can be seen in the London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE which hosts contemporary art on the site of the ruins of a Roman Temple of Mithras.

It has taken them a little while to get round to it - the show closes next month - but America's art critics have finally made it out to Chicago to cast their eyes over a major survey of homosexual history.

More than 300 works are on show in The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939, at the Tadao Ando-designed Wrightwood 659 gallery, which makes Eli Wizevich's description in the Smithsonian Magazine of "a sprawling, ambitious exhibition" seem like an understatement.

It includes work by John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins alongside Egon Schiele and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as well as portraits of prominent figures from Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde to James Baldwin.

Writing in the New York Times, Arthur Lubow praised the "impressive" exhibition as "an eye-opening global survey of same-sex-oriented art" and highlighted several works including Alice Austen's late 19th-century photographs "of lesbian domesticity".

The Washington Post's Sebastian Smee offered a note of caution, saying the show was so big and "follows so many lines of inquiry that in places, inevitably, it feels thin or tendentious" but said it was never "less than fascinating".

He said its great virtue was bringing back "complexity into the erotics of art" and said its sense of freedom was "a rebuke to those in authority who — out of insecurity and ignorance — would police and repress other people’s desires".

The show runs to August 2.

1 - Next year's Turner Prize will be held at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in the north of England. This year's version of the UK's pre-eminent contemporary art prize, whose previous winners include Steve McQueen and Lubaina Himid, is being held in Bradford with the winner announced in December.

2 - The Buffalo History Museum in New York state has postponed an event celebrating the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Adam Zyglis after he suffered death threats following the publication of a drawing criticizing the Trump administration's response to the recent Texas floods. A statement said it had been cancelled "in light of serious concerns about public safety and direct threats that have warranted intervention by Buffalo police".

3 - Everyone is a critic, including it seems the thief accused of breaking into Damien Hirst's studio and stealing clothes worth $540,000 while ignoring artworks valued at millions of dollars. Liam Gomm is currently on the run and wanted by police in connection with the burglary which took place between June 27 and 30 at the studio in London by the River Thames. His father, Leslie Gomm, has indicated a guilty plea to handling stolen goods and is due to be sentenced on August 6.