Ms. Alemani was discussing her latest exhibition, “Busted,” which opens along the mile-long elevated park next month. It includes artworks that play with the conventions of such official public artworks. They’re by nine artists, many of whom rarely produce public art, like George Condo, who has made a beastly head titled Liquor Store Attendant, and Goshka Macuga, who is contributing a bust of Colin Powell delivering his infamous 2003 speech at the United Nations, gingerly holding that famous vial of anthrax.

“We wanted to question what the public monument is,” Ms. Alemani said. “What about the traditional figurative monuments that have characterized our public space since the ancient Greeks?” (The most classical-looking piece is probably Frank Benson's enigmatic and eerily lifelike Human Statue (Jessie) (2011), a human posing in a long tunic and chic glasses.)

A 10th work will join the exhibition halfway through the show’s yearlong run, as part of a program called Vox Populi, which asks the park’s 4.4 million annual visitors to vote online for someone—real or imaginary—they would like commemorated in a statue. An as-yet-unnamed artist will handle the public’s winning choice.

Another exciting name in the show is the young sculptor Andra Ursuta, who was just tapped for the 2013 Venice Biennale. Her piece is “a giant white marble nose that looks as though it fell off a giant Greek Colossus,” Ms. Alemani said. “She grew up in Romania and witnessed the fall of Communism and what happened to the many official monuments in that part of the world. It’s going to sit in an old wheelbarrow, as though it was abandoned by a worker on the side of the High Line.”

Mark Grotjahn’s contribution, one of the hollow bronze mask sculptures he showed at Gagosian last year, seems particularly well-suited to the park. “We can put seeds or water in it and it can function as a bird feeder,” Ms. Alemani said. “On the High Line, you’re going to have the birds everywhere.” Sarah Sze’s intricate sculpture, which ended its run last summer, “was really, really popular with our birds,” she added.

Though you wouldn’t have known it from his quiet, mild-mannered demeanor—at the storage space, he spoke in a whisper that sometimes approached a mumble—Mr. Anatsui, 68, had recently been putting the finishing touches on his largest work to date, a tapestry that now spans the façade of an entire building along the High Line, just a block north of the gallery. Measuring 157 feet wide by 37 feet high, it is the sort of virtuosic performance that contemporary artists spend years preparing for, and serves as a monument of sorts to Mr. Anatsui’s now-cemented status as one of our era’s greats.

The piece, titled Broken Bridge II, is composed of about 100 interconnected panels of rusted metal or mirrors. It was first shown in Paris during that city’s triennale in April, but if you compare a photo of that installation with the one on the High Line, “they look completely different,” High Line Art curator Cecilia Alemani told The Observer earlier this week. And that’s not just because it’s hanging on the façade of a New York gallery building, as opposed to along one side of the neoclassical Musée de la Mode.

“In Paris, the work was at a lower level, and I wanted to take in the landscape at that level,” Mr. Anatsui said in a telephone interview. “But on the High Line, I felt the skyline is a strong defining element of this city, so the mirrors form large segments of the top. They invite the sky and skyline into the work in such a way that you do not know where mirrors end and sky begins.” Besides in a sense inverting the piece, he’s also made it a great deal larger, shipping over even more recycled, strung-together metal bits from his studio in Nigeria.

When you’re walking along the High Line, the work sneaks up on you, looking like a shimmering curve of sky that has somehow sliced through a building.

Until the High Line piece, most of Mr. Anatsui’s outdoor works use the same process that he employs for his metal tapestries, carefully marshaling those tiny bits of metal into intricate forms. “The one that really broke my heart in a way was the one that was at the Palazzo Fortuny,” Ms. Alemani said, recalling a visit to Venice in 2007. “It was the first piece of his that I saw outdoors.” The rectangular cloth of cheap metal, colored silver and gold, cascaded down part of the front of the building—despite its tough material, it appears sensual and soft in photographs, a classic example of the artist’s form.

For his third solo show at Shainman, Mr. Anatsui said, he has also been rethinking the look of his metal pieces. “I’ve given more attention to the shapes or outlines,” he said. “Previous work tended to have the rectangular or square format. These new ones each seem to explore the freedom to decide their own peculiar profile and contour.” They stretch out in strange and novel ways, and some are shaped like pools of water spread across uneven ground. One side of Seed (2012), which is filled with various shades of red, one of Mr. Anatsui’s trademark colors, has tiny lines of red, black and peach that jut out like little roots or even hairs. Awakened (2012) is perhaps his most unusual work yet, a jagged, vaguely quadrilateral shape that sprouts a row of hanging vines that drape onto the floor.

Mr. Anatsui has also begun encouraging “more flexibility to install them in varied orientations than before,” he said. “There’s no top, bottom, left or right, and in a few cases, no front or back.” In other words, in some cases, collectors and museums can hang many of the works vertically or horizontally, however they desire. It’s a bold move for an artist: he is certain these pieces will hold their own, no matter how they are displayed.

But this type of openness on Mr. Anatsui’s part has proved challenging for curators and art installers. Even when he was working in rectangles, he allowed those professionals to decide how to work folds and waves into the piece when presenting it. After seeing how curators at the Akron Art Museum installed works for his retrospective show this summer, which travels to the Brooklyn Museum in February, he remarked, “I’ve seen it done in other museums, and I have tried mounting them myself as well, but I did not do as well as this.”

These new works are also more painterly than ever before, reminiscent of the freewheeling canvases of Frank Stella or the sprawling paper constructions of younger artists like Dawn Clements or Amanda Freidman. “I have worked with a more subdued palette in most of these pieces,” Mr. Anatsui said. The bottle caps and cans that lend him his blacks and reds, silvers and golds are still present, but they are carefully integrated with other colors that are more pronounced than before. “They seem to have specific chromatic signatures, yellow, green, pale blue, russet brown and others.”

But even as Mr. Anatsui’s art has grown more formally complex and more refined, it continues to bubble with social and political content. He is now using old roofing sheets that, in Africa, come in a variety of bright colors. “In a way, an aspect of my environment is appropriated into the works,” he said. And those slices of punctured metal in the High Line piece are typically used to grate food, like root vegetables. In his work, common objects are transformed into art, but still remain recognizable as common objects.

In Basin (2012), for instance, those metal scraps form an airy, even lacy, web that, from afar, resembles a topographical map. Up close, it’s just metal pieces, carefully arranged, one by one. From one side, a deep black line cuts into the center of the piece like a river and then breaks apart into dozens of smaller streams—like “little tributaries contributing to form a mighty river, little financial indiscretions cumulating in a major economic disaster,” Mr. Anatsui said. “It’s about the power of seemingly insignificant trivia to grow into monumental events.”

When he begins making one of his tapestries, which often start near their eventual center, he does not know exactly how it will look in the end, or even what size it will be. “This one I feel has matte, subdued colors and its outline is not as loud as the others,” he said of Introvert, an eight-square-foot work with bumpy edges. “It seems to hint at statements hidden or locked inside itself.”

Mr. Anatsui’s openness in his art extends to interpretation. He’s named his show “Pot of Wisdom,” after a 2011 work that is some 23 feet long and titled They Finally Broke the Pot of Wisdom. Though that may sound menacing, he doesn’t necessarily see it that way. “If a pot of wisdom is broken, it could mean wisdom will spill out of the world,” he said, “or, on the contrary, it could mean it will permeate every nook and corner and be accessible to everyone.”

In a way, Mr. Anatsui’s work, with its spirit of provisionality, is perfectly suited to these post-Sandy times. Shainman may have flooded, but just a few weeks later it is nevertheless giving Mr. Anatsui his show. When a bit of metal tears in one of his pieces, he instructs conservators simply to acquire new metal and sew it on. He began installing the piece on the High Line right before Sandy, and had to stop for the storm with the piece about halfway done. The mirrors and metal survived intact.

But it will probably be a few weeks before New York sees the work exactly as he intended. Because of ongoing repairs, the High Line is closing each day at 5 p.m., Ms. Alemani, the High Line curator, said. “The piece is lit at night, and it is actually quite nice because, in a way, it becomes a bit more monumental.” Once those repairs are complete, it will be possible to see it up close in that state over the year it is on view, as the weather changes and the hurricane months return.

“The strength of the piece is that it changes during the day and during the seasons,” Ms. Alemani said. “Very early in the morning, the mirrors are completely covered with condensation, so it even changes with every hour.”

arusseth@observer.com

Update, Dec. 12: Corrected that the Brooklyn show is traveling from Akron, not Denver, as previously stated.

Clockwise from top left: Ana Finel Honigman, Didier Damiani, Cecilia Alemani and Franklin Sirmans. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

Curator Britt Salvesen, of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is the first of 100 curators who will step up to the plate over the next 100 days—one curator per day—for Saatchi Online's exhibition, "100 Curators 100 Days." Billed as an effort to promote up-and-coming artists by the six-year-old online exhibition space, the show presents a selection of works, 10 per day, selected by each curator from the 60,000 artists exhibited on Saatchi Online. But what's different about this online exhibition is that it serves just as well as a kind of college "pig book" of curators around the globe who you should get to know a little better. Do you like independent curator Ana Finel Honigman? Then you may also like the work she has selected. Well, that seems to be the premise anyway. And we'd be surprised if it doesn't get people clicking.

Even the layout of the show seems to be taking its cues from Facebook with the curator's image to the left and the artworks presented, slightly larger and in two neat columns to the right. And don't worry, if you scroll down through the images, the image of the curator, and her bio, will scroll down with you.

Rebecca Wilson, the director of the Saatchi Gallery, selected the curators, a global group that includes Eric C. Shiner, director and curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Catherine Hug of the Kunsthalle Vienna and, from here in New York, Cecilia Alemani, the curator and director of High Line Art and Clara Drummond, assistant curator of the Morgan Library & Museum.

The initiative is the first exhibition by Saatchi Online's new CEO, Margo Spiritus. “Our mission at Saatchi Online is to provide all artists with the tools, opportunity and support to have sustainable careers and to make a living selling their art," said Ms. Spiritus in a statement. "By providing a global platform visited by art lovers from over 190 countries each month, we are able to connect consumers and curators alike who would otherwise never have the opportunity to discover their work."

And connect they will. Ms. Salvesen has selected easily digestible works of collage, digital art and photography that include an assemblage by Jason Blackmore of the U.K., a photograph by Patricia Eichert of Belgium, a digital work by Annika Finne of New York and a painting by Cécile Van Hanja of the Netherlands, in a range of prices beginning at $49 for a print to $7,500 for a painting. And if Ms. Salvesen's tastes aren't quite yours, stick it out. There are 99 days—and 99 curators each with their own tastes—to go.

Elad Lassry, 'Women (065, 055),' 2012. (Courtesy the artist and High Line Art)

When the artist Elad Lassry was asked to design an image for the billboard that overlooks the High Line park, he had to put aside some of his usual working methods. “I don’t normally do commissions,” he told The Observer over the phone from his Los Angeles studio, “or make work for a specific occasion.” But the invitation also presented an issue of scale. Normally, Mr. Lassry’s photographs are roughly 11 x 14 inches, proportions derived from a conventional headshot. Even when he presents his short films, as he did for his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 2009, he projects them at roughly the same headshot size. The High Line billboard, on the other hand, is 75 x 25 feet, wider than the average IMAX screen.

“It’s very cinematic,” said Cecilia Alemani, director and curator of High Line Art, who has been programming a series of site-specific, commissioned artworks on the billboard—“challenging interventions,” she likes to call them—since she started her job last October. Mr. Lassry’s, which will be unveiled on Aug. 1, is the fifth in the series, which has included work by John Baldessari, Anne Collier, David Shrigley and Maurizio Cattelan. Mr. Lassry’s, however, may be the most billboard-like billboard, in that he actually has something to advertise, an upcoming exhibition and performance, “Untitled (Presence),” that opens in September at the nearby alternative space The Kitchen.

Which isn’t to say his image is all that accessible. Two women in matching shirts look out through apertures in a bright green wall. An ambiguous picture that blends the languages of advertising, portrait photography, fashion and fine art, it is not dissimilar to Mr. Lassry’s other pieces—oddly staged looking photographs of animals, objects and humans that suggest confusing narratives and are presented against brightly colored monochromatic backgrounds. He makes special frames that match the dominant color in the images and lend each picture a sculptural aspect. The green-framed Lipstick (2009) shows a set of lipsticks on green pedestals against a green backdrop. Guinevere, from the same year, is a nude man, posed awkwardly with a couple of basketballs while looking away from the camera. It evokes a painting by Ingres as much as it does an ad for Reebok.

Mr. Lassry said the consistent small scale of his photographic work serves a specific function: “I’m trying to create democracy between different economies.” His interest in scale, in particular the conventional headshot size, grew out of practical considerations when he was still a student at CalArts. “They needed to be small enough so you could put them in your bag, but big enough so you could see the mistakes on the print,” he told Frieze magazine last year. He liked the structure that the size gave his work and used it as a framing device (like the painted frames) to examine the sculptural qualities and “objecthood” of pictures—a practice he likened to the way Structuralist filmmakers determine the length of their films by the length of commercially available film stock. And it’s just one of a number of framing devices that would come to shape Mr. Lassry’s work and help him explore the tension between image and object. He wants you to see any given artwork by him as an object that “reveals itself as an image.”

For his most recent exhibition, which ended last month at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, he presented found images, like a set of early headshots of the actor Anthony Perkins smiling while holding an armful of milk and juice cartons, as well as a set of charcoal drawings presented alongside small sculptures that looked like bed frames. He built special walls in the gallery that had apertures in them, creating sightlines to specific pieces. Before the opening in March, Mr. Lassry presented a theatrical performance in an off-site theater with dancers from the New York City Ballet in which he choreographed movements based on fragments from iconic dance works.

The Kitchen show will pick up where the L.A. show left off, presenting a new 30-minute performance in conjunction with an exhibition. The billboard, with its image of women peeking through apertures like the ones in the walls at Kordansky, will serve as a kind of link between the two shows.

“When I started working on the Kitchen show,” Mr. Lassry said, “I decided I’d have a few images that would resemble my work in terms of aesthetics but would not be available or exist as artworks.” To that end, he placed an ad in Artforum’s summer issue, an enigmatic collage-like composition in which a picture of a framed portrait of the same two women is shown alongside some anatomical drawings of eyes that he found in medical manuals. A caption read, merely, “The Kitchen.”

But when the billboard project came along, he found that it filled a similar purpose. The billboard, he said, maintains “the accuracy” of his other work. Like the headshot-size photographs, it also presents a format familiar to viewers.

He takes the same structuralist approach to dance, and the Kitchen performance will “look at the theater as a framing device,” said Stuart Krimko, director of the artist’s L.A. gallery, David Kordansky. “The stage itself, the ticketing, the seating, are being used as a way of framing information, what we expect whether visually, perceptually, or physically in terms of experiencing visual information within the constructs of a theater.”

As a kind of advertisement, or preview, for that performance, the billboard effectively frames it. “The way the billboard behaves, with images entwined with our perception of objects and events, totally fits with how Elad is thinking of performance,” said Kitchen director Tim Griffin. He added that the project is also “a really great moment of synchronicity between the High Line and The Kitchen.”

The High Line park, still a novelty, gets a lot of visitors—more than 500,000 a month during the summer—meaning that many more people are likely to see Mr. Lassry’s billboard than have seen any single one of his shows. How they react remains to be seen. Some of the billboards, Ms. Alemani said, have been big hits with High Line visitors. Earlier this year, many posed in front of Mr. Baldessari’s image of a $100,000 bill, pretending they were holding it, while friends snapped photos.

“I do think it’s very irritating,” said Mr. Lassry about his billboard image. “But it’s more a duration of irritation. It takes a bit of time, instead of confronting you right away. Once you spend time … you start thinking that [the women] are sitting there to be looked at.”

His billboard will irritate to make a point. “When are you looking at a subject and when is a subject looking back at you?” he mused. “We’re being experienced by others. That becomes philosophical.”

rjovanovic@observer.com

Correction: July 18, 2012: An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that the dance performance preceding Mr. Lassry's show at David Kordansky Gallery occurred in the gallery. It occurred at an off-site theater.

Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988. (Courtesy Frankfurt's Liebieghaus)

Reporting from London's Impressionist and contemporary art auctions, Souren Melikian reports a "noticeable change of mood this week in the art market." [International Herald Tribune]

Cecilia Alemani, curator and director of High Line Art, has joined Twitter. [@ceciliaalemani]

Sarah Thornton visits with Jeff Koons in Frankfurt, and he tells her he is fond of "the idea that we can create our own reality." [Artforum]

An exhibition at the High Museum in Atlanta promotes new photographs and old ones about the American South. [NYT]

Here's some cool multimedia from the opening of LACMA's Levitated Mass. [LA Times]

Jonathan Jones argues that art did not necessarily come from cave paintings of Neanderthals. [Guardian]

The Wall Street Journal talks to Rineke Dijkstra about her show at the Guggenheim. [WSJ]

Jeff Koons talks to Bloomberg about his latest series, "Antiquity." [Bloomberg]

"A stolen bust of Auguste Rodin, sculpted by his lover, Camille Claudel, has been recovered 13 years after it was stolen from a museum in central France." [The Daily Telegraph]

The artists behind the much-buzzed about papier-mâché sunbathers in an empty downtown lot in Los Angeles have been revealed. They say they did it for "art's sake" and that they just wanted to make people notice things that would be "otherwise invisible." [LA Times]

An inmate imprisoned for a fatal shooting has sketched in Golf Digest. [Buffalo News]

Ms. Tickle. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

Ashley Tickle, the former flack for Performa, has jumped to another of the city's fun and weird art institutions. Ms. Tickle will now head publicity for High Line Art, the organization responsible for the curation of the elevated park, and a part of the broader Friends of the High Line, which manages the park at large.

"We are so excited to welcome Ashley to Friends of the High Line: she is bringing with her a great experience developed at Performa and Dia and a wonderful passion and commitment for art," said Cecilia Alemani, Donald R. Mullen Jr. Curator and Director of High Line Art, via e-mail.

Ms. Tickle's appointment marks the end of her one-and-a-half years with the performance biennial. Before that she spent four years with the Dia Art Foundation.

"I am thrilled to be joining Friends of the High Line and working closely with Cecilia Alemani on High Line Art," Ms. Tickle said in an e-mail. "She has an amazing vision and I am excited to be a part of what she is creating."

Correction 12:07 p.m. An earlier version of this story said Ms. Tickle will head publicity at Friends of the High Line. Her new position is actually with High Line Art.

Mr. Ahearn, who is 60 and classically handsome—square jaw, piercing eyes, neatly buzzed gray hair—was explaining how he and his artistic partner, Rigoberto Torres, have made art for the past 30 years. They cover their subjects’ faces and shoulders with a toothpaste-like goop called alginate, the stuff dentists use to make molds, and a layer of plaster bandages. The subjects breathe through straws while the materials harden. The whole process takes about 20 minutes, and a fair amount of trust. The two artists then take those molds and fill them in with plaster to make positive casts, which they build up and carve, and paint into startlingly lifelike wall reliefs.

Next week, Messrs. Ahearn and Torres will be a few blocks south of the former’s Bronx studio, on Randall’s Island, casting visitors to the inaugural Frieze Art Fair as part of its “Projects” series, put on by the nonprofit Frieze Foundation. “I have never in my entire life stepped inside an art fair,” Mr. Ahearn admitted. “I always thought it was against my religion or something.” He thought for a moment. “Well, I actually just felt kind of intimidated.”

“My favorite social thing in the whole neighborhood happens to be right here,” he said as we walked into another room of his studio, above a tire shop. He pushed open a window, letting in the sounds of buses roaring by, and people talking in front of the shop below. “This is a place of profound social engagement with everybody in the neighborhood,” he said, looking down. “It’s always jammed with people. There are always kids running around here.”

Arrayed around the studio’s walls are life casts from the past several decades: a young, grinning black girl leaping into the air, a Latina girl named Zuhey in a Betty Boop T-shirt cradling a baby doll, a group of young Puerto Rican boxers. “And here we have my lovely wife, Juanita, who was carrying our child,” Mr. Ahearn said as he walked us over to a cast of a woman with a bulging stomach. His son is now almost 3.

The strangest piece was a face with lime-green skin, its eyes covered by purple hands. The face belongs to Stefan Eins, a downtown type who in 1978 helped establish a gallery called Fashion Moda in a storefront about 10 blocks north. “I went to cast Stefan there, and he had an assistant named Hector—a Puerto Rican from the neighborhood,” Mr. Ahearn said. “Stefan’s alien presence versus this very earthy guy, Hector, from the neighborhood, they struck me as a very interesting combination.”

Mr. Ahearn and Mr. Torres may be sought after in today’s global contemporary art world—they have done work in Ireland, Taiwan, Puerto Rico, Brazil and elsewhere—but their careers began in the Bronx. As Mr. Ahearn worked in Fashion Moda’s front window that day early in 1979, a large crowd began to form. “Everybody was like, ‘Whoa, I want one for myself!’” Mr. Ahearn recalled. “I told everybody, I’m coming back the next day, and we’re going to do more.” He made the casts at the gallery, brought them down to his East Village apartment to paint at night and then displayed them at Fashion Moda.

Early in the project, Mr. Torres, then a high school student from the area, strolled in. “I cast him just like this after I only knew him for 20 minutes,” Mr. Ahearn said, pointing at a photograph of the sculpture in a book. The young Hispanic man wears a mustache and a winning smile.

“I had a good smile then,” Mr. Torres, 52, said on the phone from Florida, where he now lives. “I said, let me just smile really big and see what happens.” His piece ended up hanging near that of one of his cousins, who sports a huge shirt collar, bulging eyes and a wild laugh. (“He was a flashy guy,” said Mr. Ahearn.)

Another cousin, a taxi driver, had heard about the guy making portraits over on Third Avenue and told Mr. Torres, who was working at his uncle Raul Arce’s statuary factory, producing miniature casts of Jesus, the Virgin and Elvis that were sold at local botánicas. “It was in the family in some sense,” he said. He proposed that they collaborate, and Mr. Ahearn jumped at the opportunity. Mr. Arce later taught them how to work with rubber molds and fiberglass.

After a few months working in the space, the pair had an exhibition, which they called the “South Bronx Hall of Fame.” It was a hit in the community and in the art press. (“The trip is short and perfectly safe,” one reviewer noted.)

Mr. Torres, whom Mr. Ahearn calls Robert, also borrowed materials and cast people on his block. “He was using kitchen knives,” Mr. Ahearn said, marveling at his partner’s ingenuity. Said Mr. Torres, “For me it was kind of special to be able to let a person trust you so you could pour the stuff on their faces. You start with zero—nothing—and then you make something. You get much closer in a sense, more personal.”

Mr. Ahearn moved to New York in the mid-1970s after graduating from Cornell. His identical twin brother, the filmmaker Charlie Ahearn, was already here, enrolled in the Whitney’s Independent Study Program. The two were early members of Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab, for short), a group of young artists (Tom Otterness, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith and scores more) who organized irreverent, convention-flouting shows, frequently in abandoned spaces.

He picked up his casting technique from a book about making movie masks that he found at the apartment of underground actress Patty Astor. At the time, he wanted to make a monster movie. “I thought, ‘I can make art with this stuff.’”

“They were doing it all wrong in the book,” he recalled. “Originally, they were saying you should dabble out one little scoop at a time. I just grabbed a bowl and threw the whole thing on the face at once, so it went on as one pour. I’m a really impatient person.”

In 1980, Mr. Otterness and Mr. Ahearn found a disused building in Times Square, and its landlord let them have it for a temporary exhibition with about 100 artists, including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Mr. Ahearn and Mr. Torres showed works from the “South Bronx Hall of Fame,” and did some casting on the sidewalk outside of the show. Jeffrey Deitch, now the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, swooned over them in Art in America: “No matter how much art world validation they receive, the heads will always be a raw slice of South Bronx life.”

His words were prophetic. “Immediately following the ‘Times Square Show,’” Mr. Ahearn said, “I said goodbye to Downtown forever and moved to the Bronx and got an apartment in the same building where Robert had an apartment with his family.”

The two have collaborated on and off ever since, traveling to far-flung locales, but also casting people around New York. Visit Longwood in the Bronx, and you’ll see quite a bit of their work. Another cast of that leaping black girl—she’s jumping rope with other children—hangs near Rainey Park (Double Dutch, 1981-82), and a cast of nine people of various ages is on view above the Fox Playground (We Are a Family, 1981-82). Their paint has faded, but they still exude an uncanny energy—unmitigated joy from the children, a kind of blunt sagacity in the case of a tough-looking grandmother type. They are, as critic Peter Schjeldahl put it in 1981, “amplified human presences.” (They also have works at the Socrates Sculpture Park that provoked a public art controversy when they were first displayed in the early 1990s, a melee that Jane Kramer addressed elegantly in The New Yorker.)

Though their work has long been sold through the Alexander & Bonin gallery in Chelsea, the two artists have worked largely off the grid of the moneyed, bleeding-edge contemporary art world represented by Frieze.

“I’ve been dedicated for the last 30 years to working with communities,” Mr. Ahearn said, when asked if he worried about the commercial context of an art fair. “We’re going to take a little break from that. I think it’s liberating for the idea of who I am.” In his view, it’s just another way to get his work to a new audience.

So far, a handful of people have signed up to be cast at Frieze, paying $3,000—the going rate for a painting by an emerging artist. Among those who will submit to the goop are Soho dealer Brooke Alexander, who first began working with the artists decades ago, and High Line curator Cecilia Alemani, who is organizing the “Projects” series.

“It’s actually a really hardcore thing,” Ms. Alemani said. “I’ve never done it before, so I’m very scared.” Though the Frieze display will include a majority of works from the “South Bronx Hall of Fame,” as well as, of course, the two artists working, she said the project is intended as something more. “It’s an homage to Fashion Moda and the importance that the space had on the cultural scene in the South Bronx, but not only there.” Frieze will publish a catalogue with essays by Lucy Lippard and Walter Robinson.

In the meantime, Mr. Ahearn has been working on a frieze of a very different kind—a long pink one that now appears in a pop-up show at the abandoned Andrew Freedman House on Grand Concourse made of casts of the hands of 3- and 4-year-old kids in a nearby Head Start program.

All that work takes a toll. Before we left Mr. Ahearn’s studio, he peeled back from his thumb a smudged bandage to reveal a deep gash. “This is a really good one,” he said. “We have to get our hands dirty a little bit.”

arusseth@observer.com

A BMW Alpina B7 at rest. (Courtesy Automotive Rhythms/Flickr)

VIPs taking rides to and from Frieze New York on Randall's Island in cars provided by BMW will encounter a special surprise inside those luxury automobiles: sound pieces by Martin Creed, Frances Stark and Rick Moody. (Plebeians, take heart: the pieces will be available for download on Frieze's site beginning May 4.) The pieces were commissioned as part of a new initiative called Frieze Sounds, organized by Cecilia Alemani.

Here's a little taste of what to expect inside the 7-Series Beamers, courtesy of Frieze's news release:

— Martin Creed "will compose a short song that doubles as a hypnotic lullaby."
— Rick Moody will create a "soundtrack" that "will take the guests on a journey where they will experience the poetic pleasure of getting lost."
— Frances Stark will offer "a narrated audio collage that combines the sound of mocking birds with a voiceover."

Frieze New York runs Friday, May 4, through Monday, May 7. VIPs will have access to the fair on Thursday, May 3.

An art village will grow here. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

With its New York debut just a bit more than three months away, the Frieze Art Fair announced the artist projects that will form a "temporary pop-up village" on Randall's Island during the fair in May.

Here is the list, via e-flux, in alphabetical order: John Ahearn, Uri Aran, Latifa Echakhch, Joel Kyack, Rick Moody, Virginia Overton, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. and Ulla von Brandenburg. The eight artists were picked by Cecilia Alemani, the High Line curator who is running the fair's public projects and programs.

Gallerist will reserve judgment until seeing the village, but count us excited: some of the artists have had solo displays in New York only infrequently of late—like John Ahearn, who makes realistic wall-relief portraits with plaster and acrylic, or Latifa Echakhch, whose only one-person show in the city was at the Swiss Institute, in 2009—or not at all, like German artist Ulla von Brandenburg.

Ms. Alemani appears to have shown some love to the nearby borough of the Bronx by picking Mr. Ahearn—who was closely associated with the now-defunct alternative space Fashion Moda, in the South Bronx—and Tim Rollins, whose K.O.S. (that's "Kids of Survival") group has long been comprised of artists from South Bronx public schools.

Those looking for a taste of the projects before the fair opens to the public on May 4 can head to Gavin Brown's Enterprise, in the far West Village, where Mr. Aran currently has a deliriously jam-packed exhibition that is filled with scrappy wooden tables and chocolate-chip cookies.

Cecilia Alemani. (Photo courtesy Patrick McMullan Company)

The Friends of the High Line, the group behind the elevated High Line park, which stretches from the Meatpacking District to West Chelsea, has picked independent critic and curator Cecilia Alemani to become the new curator and director of its art initiatives.

Ms. Alemani--who currently serves as a guest curator for Performa, as Artforum notes in its report on her appointment--was previously director of the X Initiative, the temporary alternative space initiated by dealer Elizabeth Dee in the former Chelsea exhibition space of the Dia Art Foundation.

Earlier this year, Lauren Ross resigned as head of the art program to become curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Ms. Alemani has also been active organizing shows at a variety of New York and international institutions, including "The Comfort of Strangers," at MoMA PS1 in conjunction with "Greater New York" last year, and "Glee," an exhibition themed around the television show of the same name, at Los Angeles's Blum & Poe gallery this summer.

Among the works now on view around the High Line are pieces by Darren Almond, Kim Beck, Spencer Finch and Sarah Sze.