South African artist Gabrielle Goliath has given the clearest signal yet she hopes to be reinstated as the country's representative at the Venice Biennale by continuing work on the piece that saw her dropped.

Goliath and curator Ingrid Masondo were selected to take her performance piece, Elegy, to the event but Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie over-ruled the choice and described it as "highly divisive" and "widely polarizing" because it refers to the conflict in Gaza.

A legal bid to overturn his decision has been lodged with the High Court in Pretoria and both artist and curator have been in Cape Town filming for the work.

Studio manager James Macdonald said the decision to go ahead "demonstrates the persistence of art in challenging power".

The number of artists paid a monthly wage by the US government to create artwork for public buildings as part of its New Deal response to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Several of them including Ben Shahn and Philip Guston worked on the Cohen Building in Washington D.C. which is currently being sold raising fears their work could be lost.

Tributes have been paid to painter Lorena Levi who died this month aged 29.

The artist, best known for portraits painted directly on wood, had shown work in Milan, Los Angeles and London.

A post on Instagram said she died on January 8 after "a final battle with pancreatic cancer".

It added: "Lorena was kind, deeply talented, loyal, surprising, funny, and endlessly creative. Through her work, and her presence, she left a lasting mark on those who encountered her."

Born in Istanbul, she lived most of her life in the UK and studied in London and Edinburgh.

Construction work has started on the San Francisco City College building that will become the permanent home of Diego Rivera's monumental Pan American Unity mural.

The 74-feet-wide and 22-feet-tall work was created for an exhibition in the city in 1939 and two years later was installed in a theater lobby on the college campus where it stayed until 2021.

It is now in storage on campus and will stay there for two-and-a-half more years until the new building - the Diego Rivera Performing Arts Center - opens.

The building, designed by LMN architects and TEF Design, includes an open, glass-wrapped lobby that will showcase the mural.

Douglas Tom, from TEF Design, said the new building will give the mural "a prominent, accessible home where students, residents, and visitors can experience its significance firsthand".

Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni has hailed the return of six ancient artifacts collected by disgraced dealer Robin Symes 20 years after the government first lobbied for their return.

The artifacts, including a marble relief from a temple and five bronze statuettes, were held by a firm founded by Symes whose vast collection of looted treasures was uncovered after he was jailed for contempt of court in 2005.

Mendoni said: "The Culture Ministry will continue, with the same insistence and thoroughness, its work to locate, document and seek the return of antiquities that have illegally left our country. Every artifact is part of our identity and history.”

Greece previously secured the return of 351 antiquities from a firm founded by Symes who died aged 84 in 2023.

All six works will be displayed at the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus, near Athens.

1 - Kristen Shepherd has taken over as president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She joins the Philadelphia institution after five and a half years in charge of the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, and had previous roles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York's Whitney Museum and Sotheby's.

2 - Several Minneapolis museums have closed today as part of a city-wide protest against the activities of ICE agents. Among them are the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Minnesota Museum of American Art and the Walker Art Center which also canceled a performance by Nile Harris. Renee Good was shot dead at the wheel of her car by an immigration agent in the city earlier this month sparking national protests.

3 - Australian architect firm Architectus has won the World Monuments Fund / Knoll Modernism Prize for its decade-long conservation work on the United Nations’ Africa Hall in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. They helped restore original features of the 1961 building including three monumental stained glass windows by Afewerk Tekle as well as 500 pieces of bespoke furniture designed by the building's architect Arturo Mezzedimi.