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.

A work by Ms. West. (Courtesy printededitions.com)

Jennifer West will screen her new feature-length film, One Mile Film, on the High Line under the Standard Hotel on Oct. 17. Ms. West ran a 35-mm celluloid film strip down the length of the High Line for one day--Sept. 13--while the public stepped on it, drew on it, or did whatever they pleased. She then spliced the film together and transferred it to high-definition video. There is roughly an hour of footage, which will play between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m.

Plans for the High Line extension. (Courtesy High Line at the Rail Yards)

Yesterday, little kids gathered to toss native plant seeds onto wild terrain at the High Line. Along with city officials and High Line advocates, the tots were celebrating the groundbreaking for the development of the third and last stretch of the elevated park over Chelsea built around a defunct rail trestle. The project, which costs $90 million, will open the park from 30th to 34th Streets around the proposed Hudson Yards development. The project will take place in three phases, with the first phase expected to be completed in 2014.

Some $10 million of funding for the project came from the Bloomberg administration and New York City Council. Related Companies and Oxford Properties Group committed $27.8 million in funding. And Friends of the High Line will raise $20 million in philanthropic funding.

The first two lengths of the High Line—Section 1 extends from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street while Section 2 connects West 20th Street to West 30th Street—opened to the public in June 2009 and June 2011, respectively, and are quite developed with contemporary art installations, food trucks and specially designed areas with great views of the water and the skyline. This new stretch, on the other hand, will remain somewhat wild, allowing people to experience the railway tracks and the Hudson River.

Check out the site for more pictures and details of the plans for the project.

The High Line. (Courtesy Getty Images)

DNA Info reports that a handful of Chelsea activists have asked whether the $5 million allocated to the High Line in the city's 2013 budget might be better spent elsewhere.

The High Line receives most of its funding from the wealthy donors to Friends of the High Line, though its $3 million annual operating costs pale in comparison to the estimated $90 million it needs to complete its third section, set to open next year. All the same, the article quotes sources saying that money could have built new parks and playgrounds in Chelsea. "It ... makes you ask where our elected officials' priorities are," said one parks advocate.

In a statement High Line co-founder Joshua David said the organization still has "a long way to go" to raise the third section's $90 million, and says the city's help has been much appreciated.

John Cage, 'One^11 and 103,' 1992. (Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix)

Though it's somehow hard to believe, John Cage, who died in 1992 at the age of 79, would have turned 100 this year, on Sept. 5. High Line Art is marking the upcoming centennial by joining with Electronic Arts Intermix and Friends of the High Line to present Cage's film and sound piece One¹¹ and 103 (1992), from Aug. 2 through Sept. 13, on loop, as part of its new High Line Channel 14 series, which will present "films, videos, and sound installations" in the span of the High Line that stretches across West 14th Street.

High Line Art has an informative explanation of the piece:

One¹¹ and 103 is made up of the film One¹¹, the eleventh work in the Number Pieces series, and the sound composition 103. In this combined piece, abstractions of light travel across and into space created by Cage. Shot entirely in black and white, a camera pans across the blank wall of a Munich television studio, illuminated by soft cloud-like patches of light which drift across the view of the camera. To describe One¹¹ Cage wrote, “One¹¹ is a film without subject. There is light but no persons, no things, no ideas about repetition and variation. It is meaningless activity which is nonetheless communicative, like light itself, escaping our attention as communication because it has no content to restrict its transforming and informing power.”

The sound component, 103, is a 17-part orchestral piece composed using aleatoric methods.

Sounds like it will be a good one.

Update, July 19: Corrected Cage's birthdate.

The Highline Zoo at night (Courtesy Highlinezoo.com)

If you walk the High Line park at night, you'll see emus, elephants and psychedelic monkeys in mid-swing, all aglow. And this is without the use of hallucinogens. A group of artists including Sun Bae, Stuart Braunstein and Jordan Betten have transformed a Chelsea rooftop, between West 27th and 28th Streets, into a glowing sculpture garden with sound and video.

Mr. Betten's graffiti—a white and turquoise rectangular mural of scribbled faces, which has been visible from the High Line for some time—now serves as a backdrop for this urban zoo, which gets activated with a music and dance performance on the third Thursday of every month.

As you walk amongst the charging masses at the High Line, getting a glimpse of these animals on parade, you might begin to wonder who's looking at who.

Thanks to Curbed for bringing this story to our attention.

Still from video "Toilet Paper Magazine 14," 2012. (Courtesy 'Toilet Paper')

Friday, Toilet Paper, the magazine by artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari known for its cheeky, disturbing and ambiguous narratives and its high-production values, will unveil a billboard on the High Line to coincide with the launch of the magazine's next issue.

While the High Line confirmed that there is a project by Toilet Paper being unveiled on Friday, it wouldn't elaborate on what the project was. They're being very secretive about the whole thing. Qu'est-ce qui se passe?

Perhaps this video, "Toilet Paper Magazine 14," unveiled a couple of weeks ago, is a clue.

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.

"Lying Figure." (Courtesy Hauser and Wirth)

The artist Thomas Houseago will bring his sculpture Lying Figure to the High Line this Friday, the curators of the High Line announced today.

The statue will appear under the Standard hotel at Little West 12th Street and will remain there until March of next year.

Full press release below:

New York, NY (May 16, 2012) – High Line Art, presented by Friends of the High Line, is pleased to announce that Thomas Houseago’s sculpture, Lying Figure, will be installed on the High Line under The Standard, New York at Little West 12th Street. Houseago’s work will make its debut on Friday, May 18, 2012, and remain on view through Thursday, March 14, 2013.

Known for using materials like wood, clay, plaster, steel, and bronze, Houseago creates monumental sculptures that reveal the process of their making through unique details – the varying texture of a molding, the hidden creases within a cast – despite their imposing size and towering forms. His sculptures also incorporate drawing in the form of sketches on plaster and wood panels. Houseago’s work explores abstract lines and figurative forms, and in doing so he joins a long tradition of sculptors that spans from Giacometti to Picasso, engaging viewers with qualities that are at once impressive and enchanting.

For the High Line, Houseago presents Lying Figure, a 15-foot-long bronze sculpture of a headless giant resting on its elbows on the wooden rail ties between the High Line’s original rail tracks. As the third project in the HIGH LINE COMMISSIONS series for spring, 2012, Houseago’s Lying Figure will juxtapose Lilliput, the group exhibition that debuted on Thursday, April 19. Lilliput takes its title from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and conjures a magical world populated by fairy tale creatures, mysterious idols, and dreamlike landscapes. Houseago’s Lying Figure will introduce the presence of a giant – the park’s own Gulliver – into Lilliput’s diminutive sculptures installed along the park’s pathway and amidst the plants.

“I am excited to welcome Thomas Houseago’s great sculpture Lying Figure to the High Line,” says Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Curator and Director of High Line Art. “Thomas is one of the most exciting sculptors among his generation and I look forward to seeing this sculpture installed between one of the High Line’s favorite features: the old train tracks”.