In 1977, after the death of her mother-in-law, Suzanna Penrose visited her late relative’s Sussex farmhouse to sort through the possessions. Up in the attic she made a major discovery: boxes and boxes of photographic prints, contact sheets and negatives. It was a life’s work. And the life was not an ordinary one.

From 1920s New York glitz and the experimental Paris art scene, to the horrors of the Second World War, the American photographer Lee Miller witnessed much with her camera, while making many friends along the way. Her husband, the painter Roland Penrose, was a great champion of other artists in his activities as a writer, gallerist, curator and collector. The farmhouse became a meeting point for the couple’s circle, with artists such as Picasso, Man Ray and Eileen Agar RA enjoying this rural idyll.

That home, in the village of Muddles Green, is now open to the public. Known as Farleys House & Gallery, it is a pilgrimage place for art-loving day trippers, thanks to the efforts of the Penrose family who maintain the building and its archive. They have created a new gallery space for larger shows, with Miller’s wartime fashion photography for Vogue currently under the spotlight (until 8 August 2021).

The artist Roland Penrose was a great promoter of international Surrealism, and his gallery on London’s Cork Street showed the European avant-garde alongside his English friends Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.

The latter is the focus at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, in a show exploring how objects in his studio – in particular ceramics and glassware – nourished his art, allowing him to move from still life to nonfigurative work that relished purity of shape (26 June–24 October 2021).

Also in Roland Penrose’s circle was the artist Joan Miró, whose quiet, disciplined personality stood in contrast to his exuberant works. This summer these light up Newlands House (until 4 July 2021), which opened last year in the South Downs market town of Petworth, already an art destination, thanks to Petworth House and its remarkable collections.

After Miró, Newlands hosts a two-person show by husband-and-wife abstractionists Sean Scully RA and Liliane Tomasko, an RA Schools alumna (24 July–10 October 2021).

The most famous artists’ house in Sussex remains Charleston, near Lewes, once home to the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and a home-from-home for other bohemians connected to the Bloomsbury Group.

It presents the first major retrospective of the artist Nina Hamnett, a highly respected mover-and-shaker in London and Paris whose powerful portraits deserve to be better known. Running concurrently at Charleston is a new series of female nudes by Lisa Brice, here deploying her characteristic cobalt-blue oil on tracing paper (both shows until 30 August 2021).

Children’s illustration is displayed at Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, where the pioneering work of local resident John Vernon Lord – including his illustrations of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Aesop’s fables – takes centre stage. His work is accompanied by artists including John Burningham and Quentin Blake (until 31 October 2021).

The art project England’s Creative Coast sees a series of site-specific sculptures set in dramatic seafront locations across Essex, Kent and Sussex.

At Bexhill-on-Sea, the curved corpus of the De La Warr Pavilion – a gem of English modernist architecture – is invaded by a huge worm-like sculpture by the artist Holly Hendry. Composed of sections of different materials including brick, metal and sand-filled canvas, Invertebrate (2021) weaves its way around the building’s exterior up to the first-floor balcony; inside, an exhibition of Hendry’s wildly inventive mixed-media works are on view (until 30 August 2021).

As part of the England’s Creative Coast Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne has commissioned Mariana Castillo Deball. Archaeological discoveries, including that of an ancient female skeleton found at Beachy Head, have inspired the Mexican-born artist; for example, she has inscribed in chalk across the famous headland the giant shape of an ancient hairpin unearthed among local funerary finds, as a non-permanent piece of land art (until 12 November 2021).

Inside the Towner, alongside an exhibition of John Nash RA (until 26 September 2021), Castillo Deball curates a show from the gallery’s collection (until 7 November 2021), with a focus on images of the Sussex landscape – Academicians including Gertrude Hermes, Jennifer Dickson and Tom Phillips feature (until 16 January 2022).

In another space, filmmaker John Akomfrah RA presents his three-screen masterpiece Vertigo Sea (2015), which explores the sea’s associations with migration and slavery as well as the majesty of marine life (until 26 September 2021).

The elements come indoors at Brighton’s Holy Trinity Church, now Fabrica art gallery, with the latest iteration of The Forked Forest Path (1998), by Olafur Eliasson Hon RA. Sustainably sourced local saplings and branches line the church’s interior, allowing the visitor to walk through a forest (until 20 June 2021).

As well as free entry to all of our exhibitions, Friends of the RA enjoy one of Britain’s most respected art magazines, delivered directly to your door. Why not join the club?