When the second Triennale di Torino, organized by Daniel Birnbaum and called “50 Moons of Saturn,” opened last November, it triggered intense speculation that the Stockholm-born, Frankfurt-based curator would be offering a sneak preview of his intentions for the 2009 Venice Biennale, then seven months away.

Dike Blair is having a good year: in April he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the visual arts, and this month a major exhibition of his work, "Now and Again," opens at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, in Greensboro, N.C. The show, Blair's first museum solo, is organized by Weatherspoon curator Xandra Eden and is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Eden and writer Gary Indian. Born in 1952, Blair grew up in western Pennsylvania. He earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in1977, and also attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Since landing in New York in the mid-'70s, Blair has charted a singular path, making work that ranges from early paintings on glass to installations inspired by Disney World's Epcot Center. In the mid'80s, Blair began to make modestly scaled gouaches, and has continued the practice ever since. Over the years these paintings have focused on a succession of thematic pairings: travel scenes and still lifes, windows and flowers, and more recen

In The Devil's Dictionary, an assassination-by-satire on duplicitous political argot published by Ambrose Bierce in 1911, peace is defined as "a period of cheating between two periods of fighting." Nearly a century onward, the same sense of  integrity that compelled Bierce's dry pen also inspires "No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents," a program created by X Initiative to celebrate and advocate for not-for-profit independent arts organizations.

When first asked to do a video interview with Art in America for "No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents," a four-day celebration of independent collectives opening this evening at the X Initiative's Chelsea space, K48 founder Scott Hug agreed with the friendly caveat that the other contributors to the forthcoming issue of the magazine join him in front of the camera.

The Iranian-born artist talks about her first feature film, Women Without Men, and the challenging negotiations it embodies: between fine art and commercial cinema, East and West, metaphor and political reality. Over the last 12 years Shirin Neshat (b. 1957) has produced a series of lyrical video installations that touch on such issues as gender politics, cultural self-definition and the authority of religion. Drawing on the artist’s experiences as a Middle Eastern émigré as well as more universal themes of identity, desire and social isolation, these works have garnered many honors, including, in 1999, a Venice Biennale International Golden Lion prize.