Gore Verbinski’s “The Lone Ranger,” a Walt Disney tentpole opening on July 3, is likely to prompt more speculation about the future of the Western than any other oater currently in the works – but only because it has the biggest budget and biggest star (Johnny Depp as a pidgeon-talking Tonto).

In mythographic terms, the trailers suggest it isn’t going to be remotely authentic, more a hyperbolic action Western that happens to take place in a high-concept version of the old West. It could do for the American frontier of the post-Civil War era what Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood movie did for medieval outlawry, or what Verbinksi and Depp did for piracy in the Spanish Main. Or it could be fun.

Three other films are calculated to engage more assiduously with the West as it was endured. Jared Moshe’s “Dead Man’s Burden,” which opens May 3, is a sparse, stark family drama set in New Mexico in the 1860s. Having lost her brothers in the Civil War, a woman (Clare Bowen) and her husband (David Call) bury her father and plan to sell their land to a copper company.

Then her edgy gunman brother (Barlow Jacobs), a Union deserter, shows up, causing buried secrets to resurface. The couple’s humble home, the unforgiving landscape, and the mise en scène suggest the influence of “The Searchers,” though there’s an Ibsen-like intimacy in the details.

Sounding like a cross between Tommy Lee Jones’s “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (2005) and Kelly Reichardt’s revisionist-feminist Western “Meek’s Cutoff” (2010), Jones’s “The Homesman” is currently in production. Based on the acclaimed 1988 novel by Gordon Swarthout (the author of “The Shootist” and, weirdly enough, “Where the Boys Are”), it’s about a grizzled claim jumper (Jones) and a frontier woman (Meryl Streep) escorting a wagon load of women, maddened by their experiences as pioneers, from Nebraska to the relative safety of Iowa in 1855.

The cast includes Hilary Swank, Mirando Otto, James Spader, John Lithgow, Grace Gummer (one of Streep’s daughters), Tim Blake Nelson, and Hailee Steinfeld, who played Mattie Ross in the Coen Brothers’ “True Grit” remake. If “Melquiades Estrada” is anything to go by, “The Homesman” will be hardbitten with dabs of gallows humor.

Nearly 50 years after the dawn of the spaghetti Western, will the “smørrebrød Western” succeed it? Former Dogme 95 member Kristian Levring is currently directing the Zentropa-produced Western “Salvation” in northern South Africa.

Written by the prolific Thomas Anders Jensen, it stars Mads Mikkelsen (“A Royal Affair,” “The Hunt”) as a formerly peaceful settler, who in the 1870s batters to death his family’s murderer, which brings him into contact with a ferocious outlaw gang led by a Colonel Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Also on board are Mikkelsen’s “Casino Royale” colleague Eva Green, Jonathan Pryce, and Eric Cantona (the French actor and Manchester United soccer legend). A just-published still from “Salvation”’s set gives a faint indication that it will be a raw, perhaps Dogma-ish affair. 

LOS ANGELES — In the big screen adaptation of “Midnight’s Children,” Oscar-nominated director Deepa Mehta crafts a visually enchanting tale of love, magical realism, and politics.

The film is based on Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning novel of the same title. It follows the journey of two babies who are switched at birth during India’s declaration of independence from Great Britain in 1947.

The multi-layered story intertwines the children’s destinies, while ambitiously encompassing scenes of celebration, corruption, and mourning during a time of freedom and uncertainty.

Mehta talked to ARTINFO about the film, which opens in the U.S. on April 26.

“Midnight’s Children” is such a beautiful yet complicated book. What does the story and journey mean to you?

For someone who has migrated to Canada from India and has many friends who have shifted either from another country or have moved from the east coast to the west coast or whatever, it seems there’s a whole generation of movement. The thing that resonated about “Midnight’s Children” 30 years after it was done was the search of Saleem’s identity, family, and home. It was about exile and reinventing yourself and finding a family that is not necessarily of your bloodline, but inventing your family again. So the search for identity was really moving. 

Talk about collaborating with Rushdie. How did that come about?

When I asked him if I could do “Midnight’s Children,” he very kindly said “absolutely.” Then we had to figure out who was going to write it. He really wanted me to write it and I really wanted him to write it. The good news is that I won. I told him that it would be far easier and right for him to do it. He could be disrespectful, for lack of a better word, to his own work. It would be difficult for another screenwriter to do it. A film is not a facsimile of a book. It would be much easier for him to say yes, of course. He got that. He’d written another play that I really liked, so I knew he could do it. He’s a total cinema buff so he seemed to me to be the perfect person.

Why was this story important for you to tell?

For different reasons. Everything has its time and place. Even though it’s been 30 years since the book was written, it’s totally relevant now because it’s about politics and not only of a young man coming of age, but also a country coming of age. That is fascinating to me. All of the films I’ve done in some way or the other are political. Politics actually on many levels dictate what happens to our lives or how we live them. So in the larger scheme when India gained its independence in 1947 at the stroke of midnight, and that’s the exact time Saleem comes to age. It’s not just freedom. You go on a journey with trepidations. It’s more triumph, large love, and large moments of sacrifice so the journey became a double journey.

There is so much depth and complexity to the book. How did you approach translating that to the big screen?

All books or adaptions have to be streamlined. Whether you’re looking at “The English Patient” or “Atonement” or big historical pictures. A film is never a facsimile of the book, otherwise you’d have another film. What I felt was very essential before we started writing at all was I told Salman we should take a couple of weeks apart so we could really think about what we want the film to look like. Or what is the narrative of the film. We wrote it down and came back in two weeks time, then we talked about it. So we did that and I had a piece of paper and he had a piece of paper and we exchanged our pieces of paper. We found, much to our surprise and relief I think, that they were more or less identical. Both of us were on the same track and we then knew we wanted to follow the journey of Saleem on a personal scheme and the journey of India on a larger scheme. What happened to Saleem actually happened to India through Saleem’s eyes.

“Midnight’s Children” has been criticized for not fully drawing out the books magical realism or political allegory. What is your response to that?

People have different responses to it. I had a question yesterday after a screening. Somebody said, “I really loved the film, but I wish there was far more magic.” Others have said there is too much magic about the children. So what do you say? Someone is always going to be critical and say there it too much magic and others will say there’s not enough. At this point I have learned to accept the book and that’s the way it is. No one is going to like everything unless you made “The Godfather.”

Visitors tour large-scale inflatable sculptures during a preview of the exhibition "Inflation!" at the site of an upcoming park in the West Kowloon cultural district in Hong Kong. The works include "Complex Pile" by American artist Paul McCarthy and a giant cockroach by Hong Kong-based artist Tam Wai Ping, called "Falling into the Mundane World."

"The Park", as it will be called, at the future home of Hong Kong’s Museum of Visual Arts(known as M+) will cover 35 acres of landscaped public space devoted to the arts and culture and will open in phases starting in 2014.

It’s been a long winter of shuttling between galleries and museums, but now that spring seems to have finally arrived in New York City — don’t jinx it!— and summer just around the corner, it’s time for art’s seasonal migration back out into the streets, parks, and public spaces. To help you navigate the best outdoor art offerings in New York City over the next several months, ARTINFO has assembled this comprehensive (hopefully) borough-by-borough guide. From Ugo Rondinone’s megaliths at the foot of 30 Rock, to an ephemeral sculpture park at a meat distribution plant in Bushwick, these are 2013’s must-see public art installations.

MANHATTAN

“After Hours 2: Murals on the Bowery” on Bowery between Houston and Grand Street, through September 29

For its second iteration, once again timed to coincide with the New Museum’s Ideas City festival, the Art Production Fund (with an assist from Sotheby’s) has signed up a star-filled roster of artists to create murals on the roll-down metal shutters of businesses along the Bowery, resulting in a stellar nocturnal art show featuring contributions from Dana Schutz, Mel Bochner, Wendy White, Daniel Buren, Alex Israel, and more.

El Anatsui, “Broken Bridge II” on the High Line between West 21st and 22nd Streets, through summer 2013

The Ghana-born, Nigeria-based master tinkerer of tin quilting has switched materials slightly, deploying pressed tin and mirrors in this façade-wrapping installation that, between the trees growing below it and the sky reflected in it, seems unexpectedly and delightfully ethereal given its enormous scale.

Uri Aran, “Untitled (Good & Bad)” on the High Line between West 25th and West 26th Streets, through August

Another easily-missed High Line piece, Aran’s sound installation consists of the recitation of a list of names of animals, ranging from the common to the exotic. The recording — emitted from the garden beds on 25th Street — is conceptually interesting, but would be better suited to an enclosed environment.

Alexandre Arrechea on the Park Avenue Median between 53rd and 67th Streets, through June 9

Cuban artist and former member of Los Carpinteros Alexandre Arrechea has re-formed ten of New York’s most famous skyscrapers into fantastical miniatures with altered lines, shapes, and colors. Buildings curve impossibly and wind in upon themselves in a whimsical statement on the shifting needs of urban architecture. Watch ARTINFO video.

Art Students League, 2nd Annual “Model to Monument (M2M)” at Riverside Park, through May

Inspired by Riverside Park itself, the works exhibited here — created by seven students at the Art Students League — explore ideas of flux through large-scale, abstract sculptures that are just one part in a three-site installation reaching to Riverside Park South and Van Cortland Park.

Alan Binstock, “Wayfinder, Trance Ender, Third Portal” at Fort Tyron Park through September 13

Three works influenced by Florida-based sculptor Alan Binstock’s interest in deep space navigation and Eastern metaphysics are placed along the garden paths, playing with and reflecting foliage colors while subtly suggesting pathways for both internal and external discovery.

Carol Bove, “Caterpillar” on the High Line at the Rail Yards, May 2013 – May 2014

The overgrown wilds of the High Line will be home to seven of Carol Bove’s large scale sculptural works for the next year. This off-the-beaten-path exhibition will require advance reservations.

“Busted” on the High Line, through April 2014

This cleverly titled High Line Commission exhibition features works that break with the conventions of the traditional portrait bust and monumental statue. Most of the nine artists included do so playfully, as with Andra Ursuta’s marble nose in a wheelbarrow, “Nose Job,” and Sean Landers’s kilt-wearing statue of a satyr. Goshka Macuga’s bust of Colin Powell in the now-iconic pose he struck while showing “evidence” of Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, however, connotes a different kind of busted. (A tenth sculpture, its subject determined by a public vote, will join the exhibition in the fall.)

Orly Genger, “Red, Yellow and Blue” at Madison Square Park, May 2 — September 8

1.4 million feet of rope collected along the beaches of the East Coast and over 3,000 gallons of red, yellow, and blue paint come together in a massive, interactive work, winding its way through the park, re-defining boundaries, and inviting visitors to discover hidden spaces within the park.

Oscar Muñoz, “Re/trato” on the High Line Channel at 22nd Street, 8 p.m. — 10 p.m. daily through May 31

In this short film projected nightly onto the park-adjacent wall at West 22nd Street, the Columbian artist uses a paintbrush and water to create a self-portrait on the sidewalk. As his image starts to evaporate he begins repainting it, making for an endless loop of inscription and erasure that becomes an eloquent rumination on identity and memory.

Virginia Overton, “Untitled” on the High Line at 20th Street, through summer

Sitting a few feet below the High Line within a commercial parking structure, Overton’s truck is easily missed, and just as easily misunderstood. As one visitor stated last week, “It just looks like a truck with a bunch of bricks in the back.”

Albert Paley, “Paley on Park Avenue” on Park Avenue between 52nd and 67th Streets, June 29 — November 8

With their massive limbs of looping, coiling, and glittering steel, Paley’s latest sculptures, conceived especially for the Park Avenue median, should prove to be fairly apt visualizations of Midtown traffic patterns. The huge works, each weighing between 2.5 and 7.5 tons and reaching heights of up to 21 feet, give gridlocked drivers plenty to gawk at during rush hour.

Andrew Rogers, “Individuals” at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza (near the UN), May 7 — September 13

Australian land artist Andrew Rogers brings a series of 15 conch-shaped bronze sculptures to the steps of the United Nations. With some “Individuals” standing up to 24 feet in height, the works are a large-scale statement on the relationship between individuals and the collective.

Ugo Rondinone, “Human Nature” in Rockefeller Plaza, through June 7

A site-specific installation, “Human Nature” highlights the contrast between the primal and the urban, with nine human-shaped figures composed of bluestone slabs towering up to 20 feet high in the middle of Rockefeller Plaza. Watch ARTINFO video.

Thomas Schütte, “United Enemies” in Central Park, through August 25

The German sculptor’s tripedal, larger-than-life cast-bronze figures of men with eerily vacant cartoon faces are bound in pairs beneath robes and rope. Conceived as a response to political corruption in Italy, they bring a surprisingly light touch to Central Park’s southeastern plaza.

Superflex, “Modern Times Forever” on the High Line Channel 14 at 14th Street, daily beginning at 7 p.m., May 7 — June 19

Nightly screenings of a 10-hour film imagining and projecting what would happen to Helsinki’s Stora Enso building if it was left to the natural elements over thousands of years will take place in the 14th Street passageway.

QUEENS

do it (outside), curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at Socrates Sculpture Park, May 12 — July 7

For the past 20 years, artists, performers, community groups, and the public have participated in the conceptual avant-garde work, “do it,” by following artist instructions to realize works. Over 60 pieces created in this secondary fashion and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist will be exhibited out of doors for the first time in the history of the installation.

Chitra Ganesh, “Her Nuclear Waters” at Socrates Sculpture Park, May 12 — August 5

The latest artist to grace the park’s Broadway Billboard space, Brooklyn-born and -based artist Chitra Ganesh will create an 11-by-28 foot image in her trademark style combining Pop art, Japanese print, expressionist and sci-fi comic book imagery into fantastical narratives with a feminist bent.

MoMA PS1 VW Dome 2 at Rockaway Beach Boardwalk, through May

Klaus Biesenbach has brought his work to his vacation spot, where he and pal Patti Smith recently bought homes, helping the waterfront Rockaway community by providing a cultural center of sorts for a neighborhood that was devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Thus far the geodesic dome by the sea has hosted events like an impromptu performance by Smith, an urban beekeeping workshop, and art workshops presented by the Queens Museum.

Heather Rowe,  “Beyond the Hedges (Slivered Gazebo)” at Socrates Sculpture Park, May 13 — July 7

Rowe works at the intersection of sculpture and architecture and for this site-specific installation she has created a mirrored gazebo, with lattices and trellises designed to offer viewers a re-structured and heightened experience of the natural environment surrounding the structure.

Toshihiro Oki architect, “tree wood” at Socrates Sculpture Park, May 12 — August 5

For this year’s “Folly” commission — a joint project between Socrates Sculpture Park and the Architectural League of New York to commission a large-scale outdoor installation by an emerging architect — Toshihiro Oki architect will install the wooden frame small structure in the park’s densely wooded grove. In addition to the trees rising through its beams, the open-air structure will feature an ornate chandelier suspended at its center.

“Welling Court Murals” at Welling Court, begins in June

Every summer more than 50 street artists from all over the world descend upon this far-off corner of Astoria to repaint a dozen or so blocks with enormous new murals. Now in its fourth year, the Welling Court Murals program is on track to continue expanding and bringing out international talent, particularly with the demolition of the borough’s other major street art venue, 5Pointz, facing the wrecking ball later this year.

BROOKLYN

“Configurations” at MetroTech Center, through September 16

For its latest group show animating this sterile corporate plaza in downtown Brooklyn, the Public Art Fund has brought together works by four women artists — Valérie Bass, Katinka Bock, Esther Kläs, and Allyson Vieira — that change dramatically as viewers move around them. Foremost among them are Vieira’s three arches of steel and cinderblock, which reveal unexpected angular slices and views, and Kläs’s bright, pod-like aquaresin and concrete sculptures, which seem poised to spawn some chromatic monsters at a moment’s notice.

Akihiro Ito, “Tomorrow” at Fort Greene Park, through August

Ever the optimist, Ito has created the stylized form of a giant baby out of some 600 pieces of laminated Douglas fir, emphasizing both the project’s environmentally sound materials and its forward-thinking subject matter, a monument of sorts to the generations of tomorrow.

“Rock Street 2013” on Rock Street, June 1 — 2

Timed to coincide with Bushwick Open Studios, the Brooklyn neighborhood’s all-out art weekend, gallerists Deborah Brown and Lesley Heller are curating this 19-artist outdoor sculpture show that will take over Rock Street, a one-block-long road typically used exclusively by the enormous Boar’s Head meat distribution plant that straddles it. Local artists including Rico Gatson, Liz Atzberger, Ben Godward, Audra Wolowiec, Jack Henry, Kristof Wickman, and Ashley Zelinskie will present new works on the temporarily pedestrian block.

Oscar Tuazon, “People” at Brooklyn Bridge Park, through October 13

The three hybrid sculptural installations that make up this exhibition, which fuse very obviously man-made elements like a fountain, concrete walls, and bunkers with tall, conspicuously leaf-less trees, seem perfectly at home in an under-construction park built atop a series of former industrial piers. That said, we’ve still never seen anyone shooting baskets on the sculpture festooned with a basketball hoop.

BRONX

“Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial” at Wave Hill, June 22 – September 8

Bringing together works by 24 emerging New York artists who have participated in the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace program over the past two years, the biennial is one of the few to take place in a setting as charming and peaceful as Wave Hill.

“Drawn to Nature” at Wave Hill, through June 16

Works by seven contemporary artists who explore themes of nature — ranging from urban biodiversity to imagined landscapes and portraiture — through drawing and watercolor are exhibited in the Garden’s Glyndor Gallery.

Philip Haas, “Four Seasons” at the New York Botanical Garden, May 18 — October 27

At once playfully stylized and thoroughly hyperrealist, Haas’s series of sculptures are precisely rendered three-dimensional versions of Arcimboldo’s iconic portraits, with enormous busts representing spring, summer, autumn, and winter made up of seasonal fruits, vegetables, and flowers. The monumental vegetal portraits should be perfectly at home in the Botanical Garden’s verdant surroundings.

Manolo Valdés, “Monumental Sculpture” at the New York Botanical Garden, through May 26

The Spaniard’s series of seven large-scale sculptures draws its inspiration from the surrounding foliage, including a 17-foot-tall steel and bronze piece inspired by maple and oak trunks, and the 50-foot-wide aluminum construction “Butterflies.” Each billowing, tree-like construction sits atop a massive head, which gives these metal plants airs of ornate hats and headdresses.

To see highlights from this spring and summer's public art offerings in New York City, click the slideshow.

“The fifth floor is extremely special for its sanctuary quality,” Rainer Judd told ARTINFO recently, recalling the vast childhood bedroom she once shared with her brother Flavin and their father Donald. Donald Judd had named his son after friend Dan Flavin, the creator of the fluorescent light work that currently resides in the family’s former resting place and now defines its mood: “In the day, it’s bright and very white, and when the Dan Flavin goes on at night, it’s this very romantic blue other world,” Rainer said.

The luminous blue-and-red installation shines on the top floor of 101 Spring Street, the cast-iron Soho studio Donald Judd bought in 1968 for a mere $68,000. In June, the building opens to the public as the Judd Foundation, a veritable museum of art and ephemera where the Flavin piece will always be on — even in the event of a fire. “Because the fifth floor has no permanent lighting installed, the sculpture has been rigged to be part of the emergency lighting system,” said Architecture Research Office principal Adam Yarinsky, the project architect helming the building’s $23-million restoration.

That clever adaptation of the space’s existing artwork illustrates the painstaking efforts ARO and a team of four other architectural studios have taken to bring the 19th-century relic up to modern fire safety codes — all the while preserving what Yarinsky describes as the “ineffable, meditative quality” of the space. This delicate undertaking was exacerbated Donald Judd himself, for whom safety wasn’t exactly a priority (“The John Chamberlain on the wall certainly isn’t child-friendly,” one of the house’s tour guides pointed out, nodding to the mass of sharp, twisted metal hanging on a fifth-floor bedroom wall). During his life, Judd had removed the sprinklers on the third, fourth, and fifth floors (allegedly because of their interruptive aesthetics), leaving architects with the daunting challenge of inserting an entire modern infrastructure — sprinklers, in addition to the temperature and humidity controls one would find in a museum — into a 19th-century building without interfering with the domestic zen of the interior. 

During a recent tour of the space, it looked as though the architects had succeeded. Aside from a few “IN CASE OF FIRE” instructions posted on the walls, those who know the home claim that very little has changed. Artifacts of Judd’s life call the house back to 1994, the year he died of lymphoma. The kitchen on the second floor still houses the family’s wares. Glass jars full of sugar cubes and bags of Darjeeling line the countertops. Repetitive collections of glasses and plates line the shelves, evoking the serial nature of the great minimalist’s art.

Undeterred by the building’s vastness, Judd took command of its massive open spaces: a 19th-century wood-burning stove stands in the middle of the second floor, while one of his rectangular sculptures mimics the straightforward geometry of the third. Aalvar Alto chairs from the 1930s face the startingly shiny windows that wrap the perimeter of the rooms. They too have undergone a subtle makeover; the original windows were replaced with double planes of glass that prevents condensation, which, as any gallerist knows, spells potential disaster for art. On the fifth floor, where the white sheets of a lone mattress glow blue in the light of the Dan Flavin, a set of pencils and a sharpening knife lie within arm’s reach of the artist’s bed.

Despite the substantial efforts to maintain the house as it was, the Soho beyond the freshly restored cast-iron exterior bustles unlike it ever had before, a way Flavin compared to a strip mall. Rainer, however, is decidedly less dismayed by the area’s transformation. “After ‘84, ‘85 [the neighborhood] changed, and I don’t track the changes so much since then,” she said. “It’s been more people and more money and variations of that, but there’s an upside to people with money coming in that’s also true in spaces of nature: It means it gets taken care of.”

To see inside the Judd Foundation, click the slideshow.

– Rothko Museum Will Revitalize Latvian Art: One century after his family emigrated to the U.S. from Daugavpils, Latvia, the city has opened a museum devoted to its most famous native son, Marcus Rothkovitz, better known as Mark Rothko, who was born there in 1903. "This is a marvelous return to the source for my father," said the late Color Field painter's son Christopher Rothko of the new Mark Rothko Art Center. "But this is also very exciting because it's a center for living art that will help promote visual art in the region." [AFP]

– George W. Bush on How Painting Changed His Life: During a ceremony marking the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, the former U.S. president discussed his recently revealed painting practice. "You know what the interesting lesson is though, that you can keep learning in life," Bush said. "I don't want to rest. I want to follow the example of president 41 and, you know, sprint into the grave." The ex-president also displayed savvy knowledge of the art market — "The signature is more valuable than the painting" — but don't worry, he hasn't let it affect his love of art: "Painting has changed my life in an unbelievably positive way." [AFP]

– Shrigley, Sehgal on Turner Prize Shortlist: The shortlist for the 2013 Turner Prize, the U.K.'s top honor for contemporary art, presided over by the Tate Modern and accompanied by a £40,000 purse, features figurative painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, performance artist Tino Sehgal, video and installation art absurdist Laure Prouvost, and sly cartoonist David Shrigley. This year's Turner Prize exhibition will take place in Derry-Londonderry, with the winner bring announced on December 2. [ARTINFO U.K.]

– Art Market Drops in Early 2013: The total volume of sales in the art market for the first quarter of 2013 were down seven percent from the same period last year, chiefly due to a whopping 50 percent drop in the value of sales in China during the first three months of the year. However, sales figures in the U.S. and the U.K. were up over the same period, and China's numbers are expected to pick up, too. "China is a very interesting case," said Thomas Galbraith, the chief of global strategy at artnet. "It’s by and far the hardest and fastest [geography] in terms of market acceleration." [Forbes]

– Folk Art Museum Sends Former Chairman's Collection to Auction: The American Folk Art Museum will turn over some 200 pieces from its collection that belonged to its former chairman, Ralph Esmerian, so that they can be auctioned by Sotheby's in order to repay his debts. The museum will retain some 53 works from the 263 that were promised to the institution by Esmerian — who is in the midst of serving a six-year prison sentence for charges including wire fraud. [TAN]

– Folk Artist Memorializes National Tragedies: On a plot of land in Birmingham, Alabama, Joe Minter has spent the last several decades erecting monuments from junk, found objects, and thrift store cast-offs to virtually every major American disaster, from September 11 and the Sandy Hook Elementary murders, to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s imprisonment. "He told me that it was a vision from God," his wife Rosie Minter said of the day he started carving wooden totems in their backyard. "And when someone tells me God talks to him, I don’t interfere." [NYT]

– New NEA Grants Total $26.3 Million: This week the National Endowment for the Arts announced some 817 grants ranging from $4,000 to $125,000 (with an average of $32,122) to arts organizations around the country, including 218 in New York state and 122 in California. Notable grant-winners in other states include the Frick Art & Historical Society in Pittsburgh, which received $30,000 for the conservation of a 16th-century tapestry, and the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which received $20,000 towards a public art project at the site of an 18th-century burial site for Africans and African-Americans. [Press Release]

– Nahmad Gallery Reopens After Raid: One week after FBI agents seized documents and computers from the Helly Nahmad Gallery on the Upper East Side due to its namesake owner's role in an international money-laundering scheme involving the Russian mob and a high-stakes gambling business for billionaires and celebrities, the gallery has reopened with a new exhibition, "Impressionist & Modern Masters," which was being installed at the time of the raid. "It’s just bad timing," said gallery director Marzina Marzetti. "It had nothing to do with it." [Bloomberg]

– MoMA Hires David Platzker: The Museum of Modern Art has hired Specific Object founder David Platzker as its new curator of prints and illustrated books, a role he'll take up on May 15 — after closing the gallery and artist-made object store he opened in 2004. Prior to launching that venue for ephemera relating to minimalist, conceptual, and Pop art, Platzker worked on Claes Oldenburg and CoosjevanBruggen's catalogue raisonée and their major mid-1990s touring retrospective. [AiA]

– Documenta 13 Curator to Teach at Northwestern: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the curator of the widely-praised Documenta 13 exhibition (and recently one of the rumored contenders for the job of chief of the Centre Pompidou),  will be a visiting professor in Northwestern University's Art Theory and Practice program beginning on September 1. She will teach for three consecutive fall quarters, make presentations to the department and the Block Museum, and participate in graduate student critiques. [Press Release]

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For breaking news throughout the day, check our blog IN THE AIR.

Once again, ARTINFO has sent its intrepid staff into the streets of New York, charged with reviewing the art they saw in a single (sometimes run-on) sentence. (To see our One-Line Reviews as an illustrated slideshow, click here.)

Simon Lee, “Mother is Passing Come at Once” at Cristin Tierney, 546 West 29th Street, through April 27

Stepping into Simon Lee's multi-sensory installation feels like crossing a threshold into a whimsical and enigmatic collective psyche, where Lee's curation of found photographs, recorded readings of found letters, and their fictional responses come together as an enchanting, diaristic narrative at once deeply personal and powerfully universal. — Sara Roffino

Aakash Nihalani, “Islands” at Signal Gallery, 260 Johnson Ave, Brooklyn, through May 14

Departing from his trademark outdoor installations of neon tape, Aakash Nihalani brings his work indoors and creates contrast by using the white surfaces of the gallery walls as negative space in his 3D “portals” and cut-outs that distort perspective as the viewer walks around the gallery.  — Terri Ciccone

“Faith Ringgold's America: Early Works and Story Quilts” at ACA Galleries, 529 West 20th Street, 5th Floor, through April 27

Nearly half a century later, Faith Ringgold's early works still pack an arresting combination of visual punch and political sharpness, and though the “American People” pieces included here seem soft by comparison, the incredible intensity of her story quilts — particularly a brutally honest piece from “The Lover's Trilogy” — and less-well known “Black Light” series of text paintings remains undiminished. — Benjamin Sutton

Ugo Rondinone, “Human Nature” presented by the Public Art Fund, at Rockefeller Center Plaza, through June 7

Offering a transfixing mediation between soaring midtown skyscrapers and the rank and file who fill them day in and day out, Ugo Rondinone’s “Human Nature,” a set of nine prehistoric-ish, human-like figures, 16 to 20-foot-tall and made from colossal stone slabs, are surprisingly witty, transforming Rock Center plaza (where the Christmas tree stands each year) into a mythic but playful outdoor garden that impresses itself upon you less in specific visuals (though the figures' jaunty boulder heads and long towering limbs quickly become seared into your memory) than in the collective — taken together, the forms have a mesmerizing and slightly mocking aura. — Rozalia Jovanovic

Kathy Ruttenberg, “Nature of the Beast,” at Stux Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, through May 18

Kathy Ruttenberg’s dark forest of nature gods fashioned from clay overtook me from the moment I stepped through the gallery door and found myself dwarfed by a towering sculpture of a tree giantess, and as I wandered beyond into the unknown each deity was more unbelievable than the last; at once grotesque, surreal, magical, and horrific, each of Ruttenberg's creatures seems somehow filled to the brim with a sense of powerful, positive vitality — and, in spite of the old stigma against ceramic, it struck me as some of the most beautifully imaginative and captivating work I have seen recently. — Alanna Martinez

To see the reviews with images, click on the slideshow. 

One of the more innovative, and unusual initiatives of the southern artworld, Louisville, Kentucky-based museum hotel chain 21c launched its fourth location last weekend, 21c Bentonville, in the home of Walmart corporate headquarters as well as site of Walmart heiress Alice Walton’s Moshdie Safdie-designed museum Crystal Bridges. A range of artist events and a late-night artworld pajama party celebrated the opening and the launch of its inaugural exhibition, “Hybridity,” which features the work of Alexandre Arrechea, Joana Vasconcelos, Pieter Hugo, Marcus Coates, and other notable contemporary artists exploring the states of flux or ambivalence across realms ranging from environment, class, urban reconstruction, and empire, as well as various investigations into literal cross-species hybridization.

21c — which is its own unique hybrid — offers traditional luxury hotel amenities and a downstairs restaurant and lounge in combination with a full ground-floor exhibition space that plays host to both permanent installations and shows curated from the (massive) collection of its owners, Louisville-based philanthropists Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown, by chief curator and director of arts programming Alice Gray Stites. Among the events on tap for the weekend were panel discussions by featured permanent-installation artists including Brooklyn-based Chris Doyle, showcasing his digital animation work on industrial decay and natural regeneration Waste_Land as well as selected watercolors, along with Serkan Ozkaya, Anne Peabody, and Sam Van Aken, whose site contribution to 21c, Tree of 40 Fruit, is botanically grafted to yield 40 different kinds of fruit.

Saturday featured an afternoon screening of Shadow, a collaboration between artist Slater Bradley and cinematographer Ed Lachman as part of Bradley’s series Dead Ringer, which, in extension of Bradley’s long-term Doppelgangers series, retraces the steps of River Phoenix within his final film, Dark Blood, as an investigation into the intangible connections that exist across time and space. Saturday night’s festivities went into full gear with performances from artists including aerialist Tatyana Petruk, stunt bicyclist Kenny Belaey, parkour artist Travis Graves, a DJ set by Brooklyn artist Derrick Adams, and a long, long night of dancing, southern-style. 

To see images from 21c Bentonville opening weekend, click on the slideshow.

Renata Adler stood perched against a makeshift podium, her long, dangling braid slumped over her shoulder. Addressing an oddly reverential audience of people half her age packed into the temporary home of Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, Adler, the 74-year-old longtime staff writer for the New Yorker, read passages from two recently reissued novels, “Speedboat” and “Pitch Dark,” interjecting quips, asides, jokes, and questions directed at the crowd in between the excerpts. The performance was apt, a mirror image of her prose, and decidedly unlike most readings today in that it didn’t feel prepared or rehearsed. It was natural, informal – a conversation rather than a lecture. On the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who Adler said she struggled reading but now thinks is one of the most important writers of our time, she commented, in a hushed tone:

“Things that are really good, they’ll be there.”

I couldn’t have been the only one who, for a second at least, thought she might have been referring to herself.

Even though she has written very little in the last two decades, Adler’s myth lingers in the shadowy halls of literary culture in New York City, as evidenced by the cavalcade of reviews, profiles, and interviews. Her reputation is unfairly, and suspectly, marked as troublesome, more an indictment of how we judge female writers than Adler’s actual work. Not to discredit Norman Mailer, but we still celebrate his work even though the guy stabbed his wife.

In the 1960s, as a young journalist at the New Yorker, Adler reported from the civil rights marches at Selma, from Saigon, and from the Six Day War. She wrote speeches for Peter Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s inquiry into the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Strom Thurmond condemned her in Congress over a review of “The Green Berets,” starring John Wayne (“It is vile and insane. On top of that, it is dull”). At arguably the height of her career, she decided to go to law school. It is said she registered as a Republican just to be the first one who voted against Barry Goldwater.

Unfortunately, she is hardly remembered for any of that. If young writers are aware of her existence at all, it is most likely through “The Perils of Pauline,” a detailed polemic against Pauline Kael in the New York Review of Books, where Adler famously referred to the film critic’s work as “jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” A notoriously deft critic, she followed that up by pulling apart Kael’s reviews, line by line, revealing the “most unmistakable marks of the hack.” It’s widely considered one of the most infamous hatchet-jobs in criticism. What’s not often said is that it’s one of the most measured critiques of a writer that has ever existed in print. Adler would sporadically appear in print over the next three decades, before quietly disappearing from the page altogether.

But that might soon change. What the current reception to “Speedboat” and “Pitch Dark,” 30 years after their initial publication, prove, is that a writer’s work often requires time to catch up with its rejection of prescriptive literary etiquette. Adler’s fragmented narratives, devoid of conventional plot, derive their tension through an unspoken shattering of the traditional fiction/non-fiction divide. There is a push-and-pull between the reportorial or external, and the fictitious or internal modes – what the writer David Shields calls “consciousness drenched.”

“I’m not sure now, if they were published, you would necessarily call them novels,” Shields told me in a recent interview. “They are remarkable books that blow genre apart, this amazing mix of stand-up comedy, confession, biography, fiction, parable, and literary fiction.”

It’s not that metafiction, or whatever people are calling it these days, didn’t exist when “Speedboat” and “Pitch Dark” were first published, but that the lines were more clearly drawn. Nobody was confusing John Updike and John Barth. Adler’s novels don’t stake their claim on one side or the other, making them harder to define. They are open-ended and present a strong argument about fiction’s relation to reality, and if it can somehow reveal truths objective journalism can’t present.

Toward the end of her reading, Adler assured the audience that she is almost finished with what she thinks is a third novel, her first in 30 years. “In a funny way, it doesn’t go the way these go,” she said, referring to her previous books. “I think, and I wasn’t really aware of this because I was so incompetent at it, with a computer, the Internet, emails, all that stuff, but the discontinuities that are there, say on Twitter, the one-liners, now I’m going the other way. I want it not to be that.”

We have finally caught up with Renata Adler, and she’s turning the other way. 

— Rozalia Jovanovic looked at older artists like Lynn Foulkes and Judith Bernstein who've experienced a resurgence of popularity late in their careers.

— On Earth Day, Sara Roffino analyzed the devastating environmental impact of four landmark works of Land Art.

— A story on “This American Life” revealed a strange international art exchange scheme involving an autistic boy in England and countless well-known artists.

— We celebrated the arrival of spring by previewing the season of public art in New York, from Rockefeller Plaza to Socrates Sculpture Park.

— Janelle Zara visited Donald Judd's former home and studio in Soho, which his children have lovingly restored into a small museum set to open soon.

— Ulysses Castellanos visited the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art's new survey of the post-YBA generation of young British artists.

— Chloe Wyma chronicled the greatest fashion editorials inspired by art, from Harper'sBazaar doing RichardPrince to Vogue aping AndrewWyeth.

— Alexander Forbes spoke to Turner Prize nominee David Shrigley about his shrine to Michael Jackson's monkey Bubbles in Munich.

— Kate Deimling checked out Tuvalu and the Maldives's plans for the 2013 Venice Biennale, where both island nations plan to play on their vulnerability to climate change.

— We got a glimpse of the Rijksmuseum's exceptional collection on the occasion of its reopening after a decade-long renovation.

LOS ANGELES — “Graceland” is a fictitious tale that takes a bold look at the grim reality of the crime world of kidnappings, sex, trafficking, and violence in the Philippines.

In the gritty thriller, Marlon Villar (Arnold Reyes) is the longtime driver of a corrupt politician, but their personal lives become entangled when their daughters are abducted in an elaborate scheme for revenge.

The movie opens in limited release on April 26, and director/writer Ron Morales spoke with ARTINFO about his sophomore project.

I understand you didn’t start off wanting to make this movie and that you came up with the idea as you were researching another project. How did that happen?

I was doing a ton of research on an almost mood piece that was more about the human trafficking side of the Philippines. One of the co-producers, Yusuke Kamata, and I were working on this for about three years, going back and forth to the Philippines interviewing sex workers. What happened was we had funding, but lost it. We couldn’t scrap all that research so I went into a hole and started writing the screenplay. My buddy Sam Rider, who is one of the producers on “Graceland,” read it and said, “You have to do this,” and I said, “We have no money.” He was like, “Let’s do a Kickstarter or whatever we can do to get this going.” Literally within two months we bought tickets to Philippines and went out there and did it. It was pretty amazing.

Is this film based on a true story in the Philippines or your interpretation of an event that happened?

It’s more of my interpretation of several different articles I’ve read in terms of the kidnapping side in the Philippines. Kidnapping for ransom was pretty rampant in 2000 to 2007. There was maybe about 150 to 200 kidnappings a year. In certain circumstances it was pretty violent. I just wanted to transplant that to metro Manila where they target a lot of higher profiler Filipino Chinese. I felt like it was pretty accurate and true in terms of the violence that happens there or used to happen there. It’s died down quite a bit. It’s still a business over there.

What is the business? Why were so many kidnappings happening?

The south wants their own separate state. So in terms of that, they would use that fund to line up against the Filipino government to try to separate. The northern states are capitalized and the southern states are poor. Historically, that’s really what’s happening. From what I’ve heard on the streets and read, the kidnapping for ransom are targeting the lower class kidnapping their kids, taking their $1,000 or whatever they have. They will do it on a grand scale. They will kidnap like 50 to 100 kids, but that’s just all out of pure greed and crime. It’s awful.

I approach my work with more of a documentary background so I really love jumping into the investigating and I like to assimilate myself into the culture.

What I loved about the main character was that he was representing the lower class and did have a submissive mentality. However, he stopped being powerless and did what he needed to in order to save his family. 

I wanted to be very true to this character who does represent the lower class. They are somewhat of a subservient society because they have been colonized and there’s a colonial mentality that’s still there. It’s slowly dissipating and I think that’s what drew me to that character.

What does your family and people in the Philippines think of the movie?

My parents saw it and were really engaged. I don’t think it’s truly sunk in with them. When we screened it in the Philippines for the Oscar submission, we got very positive feedback.

This film examines an important subject matter that needs to be seen, but it focuses on such a dark and ugly side of the country, so it’s surprising you haven’t gotten more negative feedback.

That’s what I was afraid of, but at the same time, I know it’s what they see all the time. There are too many pockets of this sex trade world that are in plain sight. It’s so in your face that sometimes you forget it, but just to be reminded of it is enlightening.

In the movie, you do touch upon the sex trafficking issue and you show a fully nude young girl trapped in this world. How did you feel about that scene and why was it essential to the story?

I didn’t want to dumb down that experience. That does happen. The girl is 18, but she plays a much younger age sex worker. I felt like I could have cut around it, but I wanted the audience [to know] this is really happening. I think I did it in a very tasteful way. I could have gone much further, but I think it was very simple. I think it was powerful and haunting.

You take a different approach in revealing the kidnappers’ motives behind their justification for what they’re doing. How did that come about?

I wanted to humanize the villain. It’s one to have just your pure evil villain, but to twist it and turn it around to show he’s doing it for other reasons besides money I thought was interesting. I wanted to have this fine line between good and evil characters. Even though the congressman is a monster, he is losing his daughter and I also do want the audience to feel just a little bit for him. I also want them to feel for the villain and that he’s not so much wrong. He did this for a reason.  

LOS ANGELES — I can't recall ever feeling excited just to be at an art fair, and yet that's exactly how many visitors felt at the opening of the inaugural Paris Photo L.A.fair yesterday. If the organizers were going to bring the 10-year-old Parisian fair to L.A., said director Julien Frydman, it had to be in a movie studio. And that's exactly what they did: The new event opened a Paramount Studios back lot to art-world gawkers.

Booths were housed either in one of several huge soundstages or, most excitingly, in “store fronts” on the Little New York set, which consists of several city streets reproduced for filming. Visitors strolled the fake streets, ate from food trucks parked along them, and basked in the sun between stops at galleries. The mood verged on the ecstatic; such was the surreal quality of the setting.

Happily, the quality of work on offer matched the inventiveness of the choice of location. Here are some highlights, in no particular order.

To read the highlights, click through to the slideshow.