Bits: 05.28.10

Phyllis Galembo, Baby Dance of Etikpe, Cross River, Nigeria, via But Does It Float (via Ron)

• Broken City Lab looks at Austin Holdsworth's fossilization machine: "He is attempting to use this machine to create fossils in a matter of months, a process that usually takes thousands of years and requires specific circumstances to be present. According to his project description, 'the project starts with the attempt to petrify both a Tatton-grown pineapple and pheasant, and conclude when it is a human that ends up fossilised.'"

• "Part art, part political statement, 800 farmers in France have installed a giant garden on the most famous street in Paris, the Champs-Élysées." Via @nicolejcaruth.

• Why is Simon Rodia's outsider-art landmark the Watts Towers in a "perpetual state of crisis"?

• Photographer Nicole Tung writes about being detained for eight days by Pakistani authorities in the course of trying to document internally displaced people from the Pakistani Army’ counter-insurgency in the Swat valley and South Waziristan.

• Hey look: Art Not Oil is on Twitter.

• LA exhibition: Paper, featuring paintings of discarded scratch-off lottery tickets by LA-based Minnesotan Dane Johnson, at Sabina Lee Gallery June 5–July 3. The show heads to Minneapolis' XYandZ Gallery in August.

• New York exhibition: Leon Golub: Live & Die Like a Lion?, featuring 50 oil stick and ink works by the late great Golub, plus the only unfinished painting in existence, at the Drawing Center through July 23.

• Durham exhibition: The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, featuring works by Ralph Lemon, Robin Rhode, William Cordova and others, opening Sept. 2 at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

• Vancouver gallery owner says bike lanes drove him out of business. Via @artnetdotcom.

• If the BP oil spill happened in the northeast, how much would it cover?

• Your moment of lovely toilet-paper-roll dioramas.