DALLAS — Texas is often a foreign land in the mind of many clueless New Yorkers, myself included, who likely picture the state as a never-ending conclave of wild-eyed Republicans threatening secession (except Austin, which we know is officially Weird (TM), from a marketing standpoint). But in Dallas, first-time visitors might be shocked to see how central contemporary art is to everyday life. It’s a city of well-heeled and generous collectors, from the Rachofskys to younger couples like Derek and Christen Wilson; home to the Dallas Contemporary and Nasher Sculpture Center; a place where even the Cowboys football stadium is happy to flaunt its collection, with enormous pieces by the likes of Anish Kapoor, Gary Simmons, Mel Bochner, and Trenton Doyle Hancock.

Last week’s sixth Dallas Art Fair brought plenty of non-Texans to town, but it was merely the market-driven heart of a full calendar of events (including Julian Schnabel and Richard Phillips exhibitions at Dallas Contemporary, the latter juxtaposing pornographic images with portraits of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney). Conversations with dealers made it clear that the fair is as much about making relationships as it is about making sales. It strikes an interesting balance: A place where you can browse paintings by the city’s own David Bates or the late Willard “The Texas Kid” Watson at Dallas-based Talley Dunn, and then go ponder the investment potential of new works by market darling Lucien Smith at Los Angeles’s OHWOW (showing at the fair for the first time). Certain galleries seemed to subtly tailor their programming to the locale — like New York’s James Fuentes, which was showcasing gnarly found-object assemblage sculptures by Alabama artist Lonnie Holley. A handful of others spotlight the kind of traditional wares and straightforwardly pretty baubles (and the occasional Hirst) that would be familiar to anyone who has spent time wandering booths in Palm Beach, Florida. It all makes for an interestingly contradictory experience for the average visitor.

Part of the fair’s unique character may derive from its co-progenitor, Chris Byrne, a former gallerist who splits his time between Texas and New York, and who also moonlights as a sort of experimental graphic novelist. He launched Dallas Art Fair in 2009 with John Sughrue, thinking of themselves as their own ideal audience. The fair now has more than 90 exhibitors, growing exponentially through a kind of referral process, Byrne said, in which participating galleries bring their friends and peers on board. Milwaukee’s Green Gallery has been taking part for several years; this time it was showing works by Whitney Biennial curator Michelle Grabner (which sold for $5,000-$25,000), Richard Galling ($2,000-$5,000), and a sculptural installation by Margaret Lee. Nearby, New York’s Marlborough Chelsea slyly leveraged the hallmarks of typical fair-bait — shiny, reflective surfaces! Color, color, color! — in a subtle and smart way, featuring mirror works by Tony Mattelli (whose pieces sold for $45,000-$80,000, including a large rope sculpture) and eye-popping infographic paintings by Andrew Kuo ($15,000-$35,000).

Fellow New York-based gallery ZieherSmith returned for its third year. Its interaction with Dallas began before it joined the fair, said Scott Zieher. The gallery donated works by Eddie Martinez, Chuck Webster, Laura Owens, and Liz Marcus to the city’s Two x Two charity auction, and was impressed with collectors’ generous reactions. This year, ZieherSmith showed pieces by Owens — an elegantly aggressive series of found-glass sculptures, cast from the artist’s own forearm and fist — as well as work from Paul Anthony Smith, Allison Schulnik, Webster, and Jason Brinkenhoff (the latter two are both now in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art). “Everyone here asks smart, engaged questions, and they want to know the answers,” Zieher said. “They’re deliberate, and they know what they want. There are people who are putting together careful collections — that engagement makes this fair special.” His booth combined the aforementioned names that already have an established local reputation with a series of abstract pieces by 27-year-old newcomer Lauren Silva. Zieher told me that Brinkenhoff, Schulnik, and Owens all performed very well at this year’s edition, with pieces selling in the $2,000-$15,000 range, and with the gallery doubling its total sales within the final two hours of the fair.

Other highlights included a series of printed-vinyl-on-chipboard photo-paintings of forests, mountains, and fire by Peter Sutherland, presented by Bill Brady KC of Kansas City, Missouri, another first-time exhibitor. Sonia Dutton, of Austin and New York, presented a number of paintings by Dallas’s Marjorie Schwartz (several of which sold for $1,800-$3,000), architectural drawings by homeless Houston-based savant Richard Gordon Kendall (one of which sold, with another on reserve at $4,800), a massive, multi-paneled riff on Gustave Courbet by Dan Rushton, and a “mechanical flipbook” by Juan Fontanive (with most of the edition of 12 sold, at $6,200 each). San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery gave over the bulk of its booth to large- and small-scale Shannon Finley paintings, which are deliciously layered, sleek, and infinitely more nuanced in person than in reproduction. East Hampton’s Halsey McKay gallery showed Chris Duncan, Patrick Brennan, and Anne-Lise Coste, selling several Brennans and placing a site-specific Duncan commission with a Dallas collector. Franklin Parrasch Gallery sneakily tucked a tiny nine-panel Carl Andre floor piece beneath a mixed-media Daniel Turner. And Milan’s Brand New Gallery veered off the prevailing trend of the brightly eye-popping in favor of moody, murky, subdued abstraction from Keith J. Varadi, Ryan Conrad Sawyer, Gabriel Hartley, and James Krone. In many other places, though, color was king: Strauss Bourque-LaFrance and David Scanavino at KANSAS; Wayne Herpich at Blackston; OHWOW’s Lucien Smith/Nick van Woert/Diana Al-Hadid booth, which appeared to be the result of a bubblegum-factory explosion and where sales were brisk, with the bulk of the work sold by Saturday.

Chris Byrne describes Dallas as a fertile place, and his fair as a kind of incubator — a place for galleries to make sales while networking and laying the groundwork for future projects and opportunities. Because Dallas is a comparatively young city in terms of art world development, it’s perhaps easier to trace the ways in which those connections play out. One such example: Dan Rees, whom Jonathan Viner showed at the Dallas Art Fair in 2012, then had a solo show at the city’s Goss-Michael Foundation in 2013. One of his works now hangs outside the Taschen outlet in the Joule Hotel, part of hotelier Tim Headington’s private collection. Viner seems to have done particularly well in the Dallas scene: A work by gallery artist Nicolas Deshayes is part of Headington’s collection, and I also spotted a few of his paintings at the home of the Wilsons. Another artist Viner represents, Josh Smith, had a two-person show with Jose Lerma during this year’s Arts Week at Oliver Francis Gallery, which is run by Kevin Ruben Jacobs, a curator at the Goss-Michael Foundation. (Viner sold out this year’s booth of works by Will Boone and Paul Cowan, so expect to see some of them hanging in Dallas homes next year.) Or consider the aforementioned Two x Two auction held in the fall, a joint fundraiser for AMFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, and the Dallas Museum of Art; the money that goes to the DMA is added to its Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund — specifically used to acquire work from galleries that have participated in Two x Two. Dallas is a city of such synergies, and the fair and surrounding Arts Week is a unique chance to watch a place grow into its own as an art center, one relationship at a time — as out-of-town dealers play the long-game, valuing slow-burn personal connections over the quick sale. 

Click on the slideshow to see images from the Dallas Art Fair.

The Tribeca Film Festival, running April 16-27 in multiple theaters across Manhattan, is large enough to seem incohesive. Or maybe incohesiveness is the programming strategy? It’s hard to tell. Founded 13 years ago by producer Jane Rosenthal and actor Robert De Niro, it’s best thought of as the glitzier, more corporate-sponsored cousin of the New York Film Festival — the champagne to the former’s boxed wine. But if we’re being honest, champagne can be cloying, and it’s only fun to drink in small doses.

And that’s how we feel about the Tribeca Film Festival. To help out those new on the festival scene, this year we’ve provided a starting map charting some of the themes of the festival. These pairings of films, possible double-features if you choose to view them that way, offer paths to follow — films for music fans, the literary minded, those who like great narrative cinema (or at least that which is based on a book by James Franco), or documentaries that highlight the creative process.

“Time is Illmatic”
“Super Duper Alice Cooper”

Is the music documentary format is tired? It seems that every year, a new film is vying for our attention, attempting to bring a fading rock star back into the spotlight. This year, the festival presents “Super Duper Alice Cooper,” a portrait of the aforementioned shock-rock star whose more recent presence on golf courses and on reality shows has disfigured his legacy as a pioneering rock ’n’ roll performer. On the flip side, we have “Time is Illmatic,” a documentary about the rapper Nas that will bring in the hometown crowd, which is why it was selected for opening night, even if it looks like nothing more than a puff piece.

“The Kidnapping of Michel Houllebecq”
“Regarding Susan Sontag”

Famous writers take over the screen in two widely different films. “Kidnapping” is a meta-fictional comedy starring Houllebecq as himself, a controversial fiction writer who is kidnapped. The story takes a real-life scandal as its inspiration — in 2011, the writer disappeared during a book tour, and his whereabouts have never been explained. The film proposes to tell what happened, and the audience is thrown into a strangely comic farce involving a rotating cast of bumbling characters who are desperately trying to be successful criminals but failing at every turn. On the flip side, there is “Regarding Susan Sontag,” a rote informational documentary about the titular writer that covers all the main events of her life but only tangentially examines her work. The film is worth it for all the vintage footage (as well as still-image montages created by Lewis Klahr), even if the talking-head interviews are tedious.

“Newburgh Sting”
“1971”

Two docs that attempt to uncover hidden political narratives and highlight the underbelly of our current democratic system. “Newburgh Sting” focuses on an FBI plot to stop a purported terrorist attack deriving from a mosque in Newburgh, New York. There was no plot, it turned out — although you wouldn’t know it from the way former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly puffed their chests in front of cameras. “1971” tells the story of a pre-WikiLeaks group called The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, which attempted to break into a federal bureau office in Pennsylvania with the intention of stealing files and leaking them.

“Night Moves”
“Palo Alto”

Kelly Reichardt’s “Night Moves” tells the story of eco-terrorists who plot to blow up a dam, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard. Reichardt directed “Old Joy,” “Wendy and Lucy,” and Meek’s Cutoff,” three of the best films of the last decade, so this one should be a no-brainer. “Palo Alto,” on the other hand, we’re not so sure about. It’s based on a collection of short stories by ARTINFO favorite James Franco that tackle teenage lust and ennui. It also might have been the foundation of what some seem to believe to be a recent publicity stunt by Franco, although we think he just might be a pervert.

“Art and Craft”
“Ballet 422”

Two films about the creative process with much different aims. “Art and Craft,” about serial art forger Mark Landis, who passes off impeccable reproductions to art institutions all over the country for the thrill, not the money, brings forward the question of authenticity in art —just because the artist makes copies does that not make him a real artist. “Ballet 422” is quite different, a process documentary not unlike the work of Frederick Wiseman that follows Justin Peck, a young choreographer for the New York City Ballet, as he constructs a new production from scratch. It’s a film that relies little on explanation — for the better — but stresses the collaborative efforts that go into making the greatest works of art. 

DALLAS — It’s useful to consider “The Art of Leadership,” former President George W. Bush’s solo painting debut, as a kind of sprawling installation that begins with the metal detector at the George W. Bush Presidential Center and ends with the gift shop, where Dubya Bobbleheads are for sale and an entire shelf is devoted to tomes ostensibly written by George or Laura. In the middle of the center there’s a lobby showcasing gifts from foreign nations to America and an impressive quasi-holographic projection up near the ceiling that shows various multi-hued Americans moving about. You enter the gallery space, where all the walls have been painted blue and are emblazoned with various Bush homilies, and where television screens show a documentary about 43’s artistic journey. There is background music playing that might best be characterized as falling under the genre of “inspirational elevator.” If you’re a New Yorker or a non-Republican, you have to steel yourself a bit and remember that the majority of attendees here are not visiting in any sort of ironic sense. When a security guard says that “history will judge [Dubya] kindly,” you are not allowed to laugh. Another thing that is off-limits, laugh-wise: Mocking the hanging methodology of the paintings themselves, which are positioned about eight feet above the floor, as if awaiting a dream audience of giraffes. It seems OK to take selfies with Bush’s self-portrait, or standing next to a painting of Bush’s father, who is rendered like a waterlogged potato, his cheeks blasted with rosacea, his eyes hound-dog, stoned-looking.   

There have been many reactions to these portraits, reactions based both on online gawking and IRL visits to the venue (I’ve also emailed a few prominent artists I admire to pick their brains, and we’ll get to their own judgments in a moment). Of course, it’s hard to judge this art dispassionately, the same way that it would be tough to listen to a Charles Manson folk album dispassionately. The whole concept is borderline ridiculous, and offensive, if you think Bush should be in jail rather than painting his pets, himself in the shower, or headshots of his former international pals. Bush has cited Winston Churchill’s thoughts in “Painting as a Pastime” as being formative. (Sample quote: “Just to paint is great fun. The colours are lovely to look at and delicious to squeeze out. Matching them, however crudely, with what you see is fascinating and absolutely absorbing. Try it if you have not done so — before you die.”) It’s easy and tempting to politicize a critique of Bush’s creative noodlings. And that’s why the fact that some of these paintings are unnervingly, weirdly good is so dismaying, as if the whole exhibition is designed to molest your liberal sensibilities: jumpstarting a discussion about how Hitlerwas also a painter, or why Bush didn’t choose to paint any pictures of dead bodies in Iraq, or how easy it would be to shoplift one of those Bobbleheads from the gift shop, simply to avoid donating any money to this history-effacing ego-temple.

Not all of the portraits are good. Some are exceedingly terrible, as if Bush was dashing them off en route to a more interesting golf game: Rwandan President Paul Kagame looks pissed off and vacant, his head floating forgettably on a field of blue ether; King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia appears to be wearing a paste-on costume beard. But there are real gems here, some intentional, others less so — like Israel’s Ehud Olmert, painted with his mouth hanging open in mid-speech, his eyes nearly subsumed by multi-tiered bags. The portrait of Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Latvia’s first female president, is great, and Bush could and should rework this one as an abstract piece focused purely on the green background and the curling red wave of her hair. The best portrait in the show is the one of Czech leader Vaclav Havel, grinning in a grandfatherly way at something off the canvas. The surface is much more worked than in other paintings, and Bush has skipped the monochromatic backgrounds he typically uses in favor of a wall of books. A thin horizontal line of bare canvas is left along the bottom, and somehow that’s an oddly nice touch. Havel’s jowls have an interestingly complex topography. I’d be happy if I made this painting myself.

But Bush, who famously governed from a boldly unforgiving position of unearned self-confidence, probably doesn’t care too much about what elitist art critics have to say about his efforts. He might be more interested in what more accomplished art world practitioners have to say (I’d call them his “artistic peers,” but I’m loathe to lump anyone into company with someone so reviled on a personal and political level). Marilyn Minter, for one, was not so impressed when I reached out for her opinion. “I taught intro to painting for half my life, and these pieces would be pretty much the minimum I would expect from a high-school student with no painting experience,” she said. “The act of painting can be immensely therapeutic. His guilt level must be so intense, and the concentration that painting requires might offer some relief. It’s either that or the bottle, I suspect.”

Marc Dennis— another painter whose photorealist technique is miles away from Dubya’s wonkier portraiture — is more supportive: “It’s cool that GWB is painting; more people ought to try it. At this point in his path as a painter, his works are more about craft and technique rather than skill and talent, but still have merit. When he decides to paint his wife, then we’ll see if he has what it takes.”

Natalie Frank, whose figurative works often take liberties with actual physiognomies, has no patience for Bush’s sideline hobby: “While there have been many criminals who have been great artists — Friedrich Schroder Sonnenstern, Caravaggio, Egon Schiele— George W. Bush is not one. Why waste the time and ink to consider an abysmal president, war criminal, and dilettante painter: is there not art all over the world that would be grateful to be introduced into the dialogue? (Note to self: Find out if Hillary sculpts?)”  

Austin Lee, who recently had a celebrated show of eccentric portraits at Postmasters, reminds us of the part of Bush’s oeuvre that is not included in this exhibition: “I think Bush paints dogs better than people. I actually like the painting he made of Barney. He probably loved that dog.”

Betty Tompkins — who occasionally paints faces but more often focuses on more penetrating subjects, in a literal sense — isn’t buying it. “A man who had been a very bad president did some paintings that are not very good,” she said. “He showed them in his own presidential library along with photos of him with the famous men he had painted. None of this is interesting to me. When I taught painting, the thought that popped most often into my head was how very hard it is to do a good painting. When I looked online at the paintings he had done, I thought the same thing. Peter Plagens is saying on Facebook that this is all a ploy to soften up the folks for a Jeb run. He might be right. I hope the idea fails. I’m not interested in another member of that family being in the White House.”

Sanya Kantarovsky, a young painter who has a show coming up at Casey Kaplan in May, takes a nuanced but ultimately dismissive stance. (I’d initially asked him to critique Bush’s very strange portrait of Putin, since Kantarovsky was born in Moscow and spends quite a bit of time in Russia.) “George W. Bush’s most recent painterly effort has been severely over-sensationalized,” he said. “The previous paintings attributed to the former president a few years ago were more interesting, if only for their Kahlo-esque haptic intimacy and introspection. This new batch is pretty boring in comparison. Take for example W’s portrait of Putin: one might expect Bush’s personal experience with his subject to imbue this portrait with some kind of insider’s insight. Instead we are presented with a familiar phenomenon to anyone who has ever seen fan art of any sort: an embattled attempt to capture a likeness from a photograph with pasty earth tones. Yes, this painting has a bit of a yard sale charm to it, but then again, what amateur painting of Putin wouldn’t? The myriad of presidential doodles, from Lyndon B. Johnson’s aliens to Reagan’s American-dreamy cowboys, football players, and horses, are not only more interesting as visual artworks, but also more telling of their authors. I prefer their candid lightness and humor to the staged extravaganza of W’s anemic portraits.”

Canadian painter Brad Phillips went out on a limb in praising Bush’s output more than most. “Many accomplished artists may be horrible people (myself) or may have done awful things, and we aren’t aware of it,” he said. “The derision surrounding the portraits painted by George W. Bush tends to be inextricably tied to his status as war criminal, and even those who like the works can’t be more complementary than call them ‘accomplished amateur’ or well-made kitsch. However, were I to encounter his work in a gallery in New York, besides the relief I’d feel at seeing a painting that wasn’t an easy design-based abstraction, I would feel drawn to them as good works: not great works, but good works. Not great, because in his self-portrait, unknowingly or not, he’s painting like Elizabeth Peyton, who I think is highly overrated. His portraits most resemble the work of Luc Tuymans, who also has been showered with too much acclaim. However, Bush is perhaps more earnest about his politics than Tuyman’s occasional nod to the Congo or pointless portrait of Condoleeza Rice, and his muddy awkward paint handling seems to genuinely indicate a desire to craft his own odd realism, not the lazy ‘deskilled’ greige of Tuyman’s works. Unencumbered by his track record, Bush shows more promise than many painters getting press in 2014.”

PARIS — Galerie Perrotin Paris is home to a dynamic show titled “Post-Op, Perceptual Gone Painterly. 1958 – 2014.” 

“The title is ambiguous,” curator Matthieu Poirier tells Blouin ARTINFO. “’Post-Op’ means ‘post-optical’, but also ‘postoperative.'  He says the works he brought together try to define a little-known pictorial movement, which “reminds us that the painting itself is an object, you can feel the action of the artist, you can feel his hand. Sometimes it is very young, and very complex and meditative and repetitive.”

The paintings, wall drawings and other works on paper by more than twenty artists have been borrowed from collections or produced specifically for the exhibition.

We asked artists, Michael Scott, Florian Quistrebert and Tillman Kaiser to lead us through their creative process and mindset.

 “Post-Op, Perceptual Gone Painterly. 1958 – 2014” is on display at Galerie Perrotin Paris through April 19.

— Finland Unveils Erotic Stamps: Finland has unveiled a new set of designs to be released on postage stamps later this year featuring the artwork of Touko Laaksonen, known as “Tom of Finland,” three of which include the artist's signature homoerotic illustrations of leather-clad, mustachioed men. Finland’s postal service said the iconic figure's selected illustrations capture the “confident and proud homoeroticism” in his work. “The sheet portrays a sensual life force and being proud of oneself,” said Timo Berry, the graphic designer who helped select the work. “There is never too much of that in this northern country.” [theverge]

— Nic Cage Art Show is a Blockbuster: A one-day Nicolas Cage-themed fan art show, “Nicolas Cage Is God,” opened to lines around the block this Saturday in San Francisco’s Mission District, an unanticipated blockbuster turnout. Organized by Ezra Croft, who sourced work from all over the world, the show featured people wearing eyeless Cage masks, “Raising Arizona” costumes, and Cage-faced nipple pasties. “I’ve been to art openings for Damien Hirst that didn’t evince this level of excitement,” said John Metcalfe in his report for Atlantic Cities. [Atlantic Cities]

— Tate About to Open Landmark Matisse Show: The Tate Modern’s “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” show, opening Thursday, has garnered a lot of attention for bringing the artist's late works together for the first time in a generation. "This kind of show just doesn't happen more than once in a lifetime," Tate director and show co-curator Nicholas Serota said. "This is the largest show of this body of works and contains most of the major works." [The Guardian]

— Sotheby’s Board Fight Update: In preparation for the upcoming Sotheby’s board fight, Daniel Loeb has released an investor presentation that calls for the removal of board members Robert A. Taubman and Jessica M. Bibliowicz and opposes nominee Danny Meyer. [AMM]

— Falckenberg on “The Art World We Deserve”:“Art in today’s society has risen to become a new dominant culture, anchored like sport and showbiz in the system of international companies and the mass media,” says collector and art theory professor Harald Falckenberg, ruminating on the state of the art world.  [FT]

— L.A. After $7.5M in Arts Funding: A legal snag has entangled $7.5 million in funds for cultural events in L.A. for years and now city officials are attempting to remove the red tape. [LAT]

— Photographer Mario Testino has been named President of the Board of the World Monuments Fund in his native Peru. WMF Peru is the organization's first office in South America. [Art Daily]

— Thieves broke into the Briars historic homestead, south of Melbourne, and stole historic artifacts including a lock of Napoleon Bonaparte’s hair. [BBC]

— In celebration of its 75th anniversary, the Hyde Park Art Center has announced expansion projects for a new wing that will include artist studio space. [DNAinfo]

ALSO ON ARTINFO

Making Friends, and Money, at the Dallas Art Fair

Marilyn Minter, Betty Tompkins, and Others Gauge George W. Bush's Work

VIDEO: Dallas Fêtes Sixth Art Fair with "Eye Ball"

VIDEO: "Post-Op, Perceptual Gone Painterly" at Galerie Perrotin in Paris

Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

I am very happy to announce the launch of the latest BlouinArtinfo website, BlouinArtinfo Middle East. Like our other sites, this one draws together top-notch reporting and critical opinion on the visual and performing arts, architecture and design, fashion, travel, and lifestyle subjects from around the world, presenting it in a thoughtful mix aimed particularly at readers in its region. And also like those sites, it will offer its readers—and readers of all our sites—great, of-the-moment storytelling from the region, like this video about Richard Serra’s new project in the desert outside Doha.

For those of us in the West, of course, the Middle East is not just a fascinating part of the world but one we need to understand better, and that we hope will understand us better, too. In my view, there is no better way for divergent worlds to get to know one another than through information about each other’s cultures—which is BlouinArtinfo’s stock-in-trade.

Our 24 sites across 20 countries and regions have allowed us to become part of an important global conversation, based on culture, about who we human beings have been, are now, and can be in the future. It may seem trite to say so, but we are a better world together than apart, and it’s a privilege for BlouinArtinfo to play a role, however small, in bridging the gaps between us.

—Louise Blouin, Chairman, Louise Blouin Media

WHAT:“Swoon: Submerged Motherlands”
WHEN: April 11-August 24, 2014
WHERE: Brooklyn Museum, Iris and Gerald B. Cantor Gallery, 5th Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn

WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: On the fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum, rising from the remnants of lean-to’s that were once boats, a 60-foot tree made of dyed cloth and adorned with delicately cut paper leaves towers over the proceedings. The huge, technically complex construction — for which the artist enlisted the help of an engineer — is a new work by the Brooklyn-based artist Swoon (born Caledonia Dance Curry) for her solo exhibition “Submerged Motherlands.” Inspired by the Hurricane Sandy’s devestation of low-lying neighborhoods in New York and by Doggerland, a once-populated landmass off the coast of Britain  that was flooded by rising sea levels some 8,000 years ago, the exhibition explores social change in the wake of environmental disaster.

The show combines Swoon’s signature figurative works on paper, cut and drawn by hand, with retired boats  left over from her 2009 project “Swimming Cities of Serenissima,” in which the artist and a crew of 28 people sailed from Slovenia to the Venice Biennale on structures made from found materials. Also on view are site-specific elements like a small and intimate gazebo, its exterior covered with drawings and cut paper that chronicle the life of the artist’s late mother, its inside furnished with benches and an intricate honey-comb ceiling made of cardboard and paper butterflies and lizards.

The show’s various pieces come together to create a fantastical vision, an answer of sorts to troubling questions raised by the artist about the fate of civilization in an age of climate change. “Submerged Motherlands” presents a surreal world of possibilities, seen most clearly in her once-floating boat habitats, while reflecting on the losses brought on by nature and life cycles. With the walls of the rotunda spray-painted a deep aquamarine nearly to the top, the installation creates the powerful sense of submersion beneath a tidal surge, giving visitors a taste of life under water.

To see pictures of Swoon’s “Submerged Motherlands” installation, click the slide show here. 

Last week in Dallas, Ryan McNamara presented a performance in the form of a gently vandalized press conference. The setting was the city’s I.M. Pei-designed Meyerson Symphony Center, and the occasion was the official announcement of Soluna, a three-week art-and-music festival centered around the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and slated for May of 2015. Like most press conferences, this one started out with some basic welcoming remarks, in this case from the symphony’s president and CEO, Jonathan Martin, who laid out Soluna’s rather broad thematic (“Destination (America)”) and described Dallas as a “microcosm of America’s emerging and future face.” He mentioned a question that constantly preoccupies him and his colleagues: “Where is classical music headed, and how do we as an orchestra maintain its relevance, both here in Dallas, and in society? We believe that one of the catalysts to ensure a future for art and music, and a future audience, lies in the cross-pollination of genres and talent.”

Martin was followed by Anna-Sophia van Zweden, the director of festival advancement for Soluna (and the daughter of Dallas Symphony Orchestra conductor Jaap van Zweden). Two confirmed components of the event, she said, are a new commission from Pipilloti Rist, and an evening that combines videos by Yael Bartana with the music of Leonard Bernstein’s “Kaddish.” Everything seemed fairly normal until the sound of orchestral instruments in the distance started making it more than a little hard to hear van Zweden’s description of the festival’s partnerships and sponsorships. The cause of that disturbance soon materialized — in the form of jumpsuit-wearing strangers pushing trolleys bearing various orchestra members, playing a hybrid classical composition as they were wheeled in a circle around the assembled visitors, journalists, and collectors in town for the Dallas Art Fair. Van Zweden kept talking throughout, her voice a low and indecipherable murmur beneath the symphony’s elegant soundtrack.

If only all media events were so concise, and interrupted by live music before boredom sets in! “Everyone hates a long press conference,” McNamara told me after the event. He’d been tapped to organize the day’s performance and jumped at the opportunity to work with an actual orchestra — normally a prohibitively expensive proposition, he says. The trolley-pushers were local Dallas actors, since McNamara was seeking “someone who can inhabit that slower pace, [which] is actually a skill,” not to mention the appropriate “stoic gaze” whilst pushing. Their jumpsuits were inspired by the colors of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Dallas Panels (Blue Green Black Red),” a massive work that hangs in the lobby of the Meyerson Symphony Center. “Next time we’re going to get a perfect Ellsworth Kelly Green,” McNamara said, since the jumpsuit version was admittedly more of a sea-foam.

The artist, who recently was awarded the Malcolm McLaren Award for his work in Performa 13, hopes to take part in Soluna himself, though he’s still sorting out the scheduling. Van Zweden notes that Soluna will sprawl throughout Dallas and will incorporate many of the local art institutions, like the Goss-Michael Foundation and Dallas Contemporary. “We’re looking into doing a lot of work in the public space,” she told me. “We have the ability to work with the chamber orchestras, so we’ll have little concerts throughout the city. It’s a big experiment.”

— “Mobile Lovers” Lifted by Youth Club: Bansky’s recent “Mobile Lovers” piece was discovered yesterday in Bristol, but just as fans began showing up for a look, members of a local youth group removed the artwork with a crowbar and stowed it inside their center. Dennis Stinchcombe, 58, leader of the Broad Plain & Riverside Youth Project, hopes to sell it to keep the financially struggling facility open. He claims that because the artwork was created on a removal plank of wood, it was meant to be taken. “I think Banksy’s give it to us as a gift. It’s left out there for somebody to do something with, and I think I’m doing something with it,” Stinchcombe said. [Guardian, Independent]

— Folk Art Architects Speak Out: The architects of the former Folk Art Museum, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, have spoken publicly for the first time about MoMA’s plans to tear the building down. “Yes, all buildings one day will turn to dust, but this building could have been reused,” Williams said. “Unfortunately, the imagination and the will were not there.” [NYT]

— Performance Artist’s Boston Bomb Hoax: Self-described performance artist Kayvon Edson was arrested at the finish line of the Boston Marathon yesterday, donning a black veil and shouting “Boston Strong,” as the city mourned the one-year anniversary of last year’s horrific bombings. The 25-year-old art student is being charged with disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, and possession of a hoax device after police were forced to explode a backpack he left at the scene that contained a rice cooker. [Business Insider, MassLive]

— More Delays for Picasso Museum: Paris’s Picasso Museum, which has been closed for the past four years, has delayed its opening again to an unspecified date probably at the end of this year. [NYT]

— Caillebotte Restoration Surprises: A restoration of Gustave Caillebotte’s “Paris Street; Rainy Day” at the Art Institute of Chicago has revealed the artist to be more of an Impressionist than previously thought. [WSJ]

— Milwaukee Weather Deficit: Harsh winter weather slashed attendance significantly and contributed to six-figure deficits for the Milwaukee Art Museum. [Journal Sentinel]

— Marianne Rosenberg, the granddaughter of the now-famous art dealer whose collection (which included Matisse and Picasso) was seized by Nazis during World War II, plans to open a gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. [DNAinfo]

— Elena Filipovic, currently senior curator at the WIELS Contemporary Art Center in Brussels, has been appointed the new director of the Kunsthalle Basel. [Artforum]

— A new documentary film will explore the history of the influential Chouinard Art Institute in the years before the California Institute of the Arts absorbed it. [LAT]

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Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

MILAN — “It’s hard to talk about a table,” said Spanish designer Jaime Hayon. This mundane object, after all, is just a “board with four legs,” and there are literally millions of them in the world. Yet during a so-called “roundtable” discussion at Danish furniture company Fritz Hansen’s Milan showroom last week, timed to coincide with Salone de Mobile, Hayon found quite a bit to say about his new Fritz Hansen Analog Table, a design driven by dialog, philosophy, and mathematics.

“This is a new form; it’s not round, it’s not oval, and it’s not square,” Hayon explained. Round tables, ironically, are hard on conversations because they put sitters at a distance; squares, almost by definition, are uncool. “I looked at what’s good about each one and took a little bit from each.” The result is what he calls a Hayonic form, an elongated near-hexagon with subtle convexities, rounded on its edges to make the angles almost undetectable. He engineered a new geometry that literally brings its sitters closer together, allowing them to be seated comfortably without intruding on each other’s elbowroom.

Designed for home, restaurant, or office, the goal was to enhance conversation. “The point was a six-person table with comfort on every zone, not having a square or circle, and still [being] generous,” Hayon continued. “I went to Fritz Hansen and brought the philosophy, not the form of what I wanted to do.” The new shape extends below the surface to the Hayonic legs, reinforced with aluminum and set at angles borrowed from traditional Japanese architecture that bolsters stability without increasing bulk.

References to Japanese architecture are, somewhat surprisingly, a prominent feature of traditional Danish design. Like that of the Japanese, the Scandinavian aesthetic can be summarily described as incorporating clean, organic lines, unadulterated natural materials, and quiet silhouettes. Meanwhile, Hayon, known for his pronounced sense of humor, designed a green chicken-shaped rocking chair and donned a spacesuit for the 2013 “Funtastico” retrospective of his work at the Groninger museum. Despite such theatrics, Hayon and Fritz Hansen, now in their second year of collaboration, have proven that they go quite well together. In its Milan showroom, the Danish manufacturer even presented Hayon’s new design with its recently relaunched Drop Chair, a 1950s design by the late Danish modernist Arne Jacobsen.

“I always analyze a bit who I’m working with,” Hayon said. “It’s not research. I’m listening to them. I’ve noticed a lot of people don’t listen to anybody. They just go to companies and say, ‘this is what I want to do.’ I’ve never understood how a designer could go to Fritz Hansen and make a square sofa. They can do anything you want. You come with a square? That’s like saying to a three-star Michelin chef, ‘Boil me an egg.’”

The respect, of course, is mutual. Shortly after last year’s launch of Hayon’s first Fritz Hansen design — the wingbacked, extravagantly comfortable Ro Armchair — Christian Rasmussen, the company’s head of design, expressed ease in working with his new business partner. “It’s nice to [hear other languages] interpret the names in their own way,” he told the Architect’s Newspaper. “Some of the best interpretations of Danish design history come from abroad. Jamie isn’t afraid of going close to our heritage.”

Vincenzo Bellini’s “I puritani,” a bel canto opera in three-acts that was the Italian composer’s final work, will return to the Metropolitan Opera beginning April 17. The production is a revival of Sandro Sequi’s 1976 staging, which has served as a showcase for famous stars of opera, including Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti. Russian soprano Olga Peretyatko will make her debut at the storied opera house in the role of Elvira, a young woman driven to hysteria over the love of two men, alongside Lawrence Brownlee and Mariusz Kwiecien as Arturo and Riccardo respectively, the two men fighting over her heart.

“I puritani” premiered at Théâtre-Italien in Paris on January 24, 1835, eight months before Bellini’s death from acute inflammation of the intestine. The libretto was written by Carlo Pepoli (whom Bellini reportedly did not get along with, the composer finding fault with Pepoli’s inexperience writing for the voice) and based on the play “Têtes rondes et Cavaliers” by Jacques-François Ancelot and Joseph Xavier Saintine, itself based on Walter Scott’s novel “Old Mortality,” the most well-regarded piece of the writer’s “Tales of My Landlord” series.

In a review of the 2006 revival of the same production, New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini called Sequi’s take on Bellini “dusty” and an example of “the stand-and-deliver school of directing.”

Michele Mariotti, Peretyatko’s husband, will conduct, the first time the couple have worked together on Bellini’s opera. Peretyatko previously sang the role of Elvira at the Lyon Opera and the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, and was recently seen as Zerbinetta in Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” at the Hamburg State Opera. Mariotti first appeared at the Met directing Bizet’s “Carmen” last season, followed by the production of “Rigoletto.”

Bellini’s “I puritani” will run through May 10 at the Metropolitan Opera.

Thursday night sees a slew of openings in New York, but before you make the rounds this evening, check out these five stellar exhibitions currently on view, before it’s too late.

“Particular Pictures” at the Suzanne Geiss Company, through April 26

Artists Joshua Abelow and Emily Ludwig Shaffer co-curate a group show based around a quote from “Twin Peaks” about the sort of imagery we see in dreams, and the result is as weirdly surreal and refreshing as you might expect. “One of the things I love about ‘Twin Peaks’ is that the narrative is very specific, yet it is also abstract and not always clear,” Abelow said. “That’s what we were thinking about with this show: putting works together in a specific way, but leaving plenty of room for interpretation.” What does the artist/curator see when he’s sleeping, I wondered? “My own dreams aren’t terribly exciting,” Abelow admitted. “Sometimes I dream of very mundane things like eating a sandwich. One time I dreamt I was driving a car and I needed to honk the horn, but for some reason I couldn’t.” There are plenty of gems in “Particular Pictures”: Gregory Kalliche’s four-screen, wrap-around video installation that surrounds you with spinning globes bearing the word “Earthish”; awesomely precise paintings by Laeh Glenn; hats repurposed as wall sculptures using the Trivial Pursuit color palette (Anna-Sophie Berger); and a table that doubles as a sculptural notebook doodle page (Lukas Geronimas).  

Ryan Schneider, “Ritual for Letting Go” at Two Rams, through April 28

A suite of large-scale works evinces a new direction for Schneider. He creates them by first laying down a wash of pigment and turpenoid, then crafting the basic forms by adding masses of Prussian blue pigment and literally scratching the composition into the surface. The end results are beautifully layered, mixing elements of painting and drawing and adding drama to deceptively simple scenes (birds alighting on a tree; a still life with an enormous vase). It’s been a while since Schneider has had a prominent solo exhibition in New York, and he’s a smart choice for the sophomore show at this recently opened L.E.S. space around the corner from the New Museum.

Lucas Foglia, “Frontcountry” at Fredericks & Freiser, through April 19

Photographs taken in Montana, Texas, and Wyoming, among other places, capture ordinary people in an extraordinary manner. An image of two girls near a Gatorade cooler becomes a study in conflicting geometries, thanks to a grid of shadow nearly obscuring them; elsewhere, photos of coal mines, rodeos, and the West’s breathtaking emptiness are equally arresting. The stand-out is “Soccer Practice, Star Valley Braves, Afton, Wyoming,” 2010, in which a cluster of teenage players are arranged with all the drama of the soldiers on the Iwo Jima memorial, vying for a high-altitude ball that is out of the frame. Behind them, the impossibly intense mountain backdrop looks almost implausible, as if Foglia has Photoshopped in the crisp peaks adorning a Coors Light bottle. The entire series is also collected in a just-published monograph from Nazraeli Press.

Kristen Morgin, “The Super Can Man And Other Illustrated Classics,” at Zach Feuer Gallery, through May 3

You’d be forgiven for walking into this show unimpressed with the arrangement of shabby toys, stacks of books, and other dusty oddities. On closer inspection, though, you’ll note that it’s all made out of painted, unfired clay. The craft-intensive verisimilitude brings to mind Chris Bradley’s painted-metal cardboard and potato chips, or the sculpture of Tom Friedman, and Morgin’s fixation on comic and junkshop culture shows an affinity with Mike Kelley. This is an exhibition to linger over, if only to ponder the obsessive process that made it possible.

Etel Adnan at Callicoon Fine Arts, through May 23

Born in 1925, Adnan is currently enjoying more buzz than many market-friendly painters in their 20s. She was featured in Documenta (13) and is included in this year’s Whitney Biennial. Callicoon’s show is spread across Callicoon’s Delancey Street and Forsythe Street spaces. At the former, a series of recent works and ones from the ’80s showcase her facility with pared-down, quasi-abstracted landscapes. They sing in their simplicity, primary-colored kindred spirits of the likes of Thomas Nozkowski or Andrew Massullo. At the Forsythe location, the focus is on a number of the artist’s books in vitrines — less immediately impressive, but a nice counterpoint to the paintings around the corner.

Also Worth a Visit:

Urs Fischer’s bank takeover at the Gagosian L.E.S. Pop-up, through May 23; Eva Berendes’s spare, inventive sculptures in “Spring/Summer” at CRG, through April 26; the actually-pretty-funny-James-Franco-film made by Carter, at Lisa Cooley Gallery, through April 27; librarian-artist Ben Gocker’s handmade assemblages and mixed-media works at P.P.O.W., through April 19. 

— Banderas to Play Picasso: Antonio Banderas has announced that “the time has come” for him to play Pablo Picasso, opposite Gwyneth Paltrow, in an upcoming film project titled “33 dias.” Directed by Carlos Saura, the film will focus on the making of  “Guernica.” “I turned down the chance at one point of playing Mr. Pablo, but the time has come in my life where I understand him better,” Banderas said. [Fox News Latino]

— Syria’s Heritage Sites Damaged by War: Despite UNESCO’s efforts to protect all six of Syria’s World Heritage sites, historic areas of the region are feeling the effects of war through physical damage and rampant looting. Medieval markets in the city of Aleppo have been gutted due to shelling, and occupation by insurgents has damaged one of the world’s best-preserved Crusader castles, the Crac des Chevaliers. Archaeologists at Palmyra are still being paid, though they’re unable to work at the excavation site, which is under military guard. [NYT]

— Switzerland Names Biennale Pick: Zurich-based artist Pamela Rosencranz will represent Switzerland at next year’s Venice Biennale. “With unexpected references to topics we encounter in the generated images and overabundant information of everyday life, Pamela Rosenkranz creates links that enable us to see things in an unexpectedly connected way while haunting and alienating us at the same time,” said the Swiss arts council Pro Helvetia. [Artforum]

— Artists to Recreate Human Zoo: Artists Mohamed Ali Fadlabi and Lars Cuzner are planning to recreate “The Congo Village,” a human zoo brought to Norway in 1914 that put 80 African people on display. [TAN]

— Chicago Plans Fireworks Piece: Judy Chicago is creating a giant butterfly-shaped fireworks display in Prospect Park. [DNAinfo]

— RIP Edward J. Sozanski: Longtime Philadelphia Inquirer art critic Edward J. Sozanski has passed away at 77. [Philly]

— Visitors vandalized pre-Raphaelite paintings and an outdoor statue at the Delaware Museum of Art with stickers. [Delaware Online]

— Art handlers working for the Chicago-based company Mana-Terry Dowd are set to vote on joining the Teamsters Local 705 union later this month. [TAN]

— The 2014 BP Portrait shortlist has been released and includes only male artists this year. [The Guardian]

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Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.