Homebase offers support to individuals and families who have fallen behind on rent and are close to being evicted to try to get them back on their feet again. The study, backed by a handful of academics and designed to evaluate the efficiency of the program in the coming months, is based around 400 households that asked Homebase for help over the summer. Half of them were accepted, half were denied, and all had the honor of participating in a trial that used them as "lab rats."

Issues of human decency aside, according to The Times, Homebase was actually declared "highly successful" in the September 2010 Mayor's Magagement Report.

"They should immediately stop this experiment," a justifiably outraged Scott Stringer told the paper. The Observer is with Mr. Stringer. Nothing says "Happy Holidays" like being denied vital assistance for the next two years.

ajulius@observer.com

"Fritz Haeg: Something for Everyone"

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Conn.

Through Jan. 2, 2011

A home for Rocky, sans Bullwinkle. Sculptor Fritz Haeg's witty projects for the front lawn of the Aldrich Muwseum include Animal Estate, a series of warrens designed for the property's flying squirrels. Nearby, his giant Dancing Boardwalk invites strolls atop a gleaming wooden hexagon placed on the grass. There's also, in the show curated by Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, an outdoor tent school, a garden and a living-room-style salon.

www.aldrichart.org

Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens

PepsiCo, 700 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, N.Y.

Ongoing

When PepsiCo exchanged its Manhattan headquarters for the green and pleasant lands of Purchase, N.Y., decades ago, the company's chief executive, Donald M. Kendall, endorsed the creation of a sculpture garden in the cola corporation's new home. It's likely one of the few art spaces in the state that brings together the spindly Gothic forms of Alberto Giacommetti and the neo-Classical bronzes cast by Auguste Rodin. Mr. Kendall's legacy has also provided a landscape home for works by Alexander Calder, Henry Moore and Max Ernst for window-gazing Pepsi staff and art lovers to view since 1970.

Storm King Art Center

Old Pleasant Hill Road,
Mountainville, N.Y.

Through the fall

Originally launched as an exhibition space for Hudson Valley painters, Storm King is now known, above all, for its sprawling sculpture gardens, set over 500 acres of Hudson woodland. In honor of Storm King's 50th anniversary, curator David Collens has overseen the compilation of "5+5," an outdoor exhibit of 10 sculptors whose work has been chosen for its fit with the surrounding landscape. The show will run through the fall, illustrating how the changing seasons influence the art. Artists on display include Andy Goldsworthy and Darrell Petit.

www.stormking.org

"Figment Terrace"

Governors Island

Through Oct. 3

It's alive! The grass-sprouting lawn furniture, that is, that's part of this sculpture show on busy, buzzy Governors Island. (Only in New York could you turn over much of an island to art, then turn a slice of that island into art.) "Figment" spreads 16 interactive sculptures by various artists over the manicured lawns of the former colonial outpost. 1000 Pieces is something of a gazebo made out of new-fangled Lincoln logs; Touch offers life-size inflatable white trees. There's also a big abacus, a suite of drums to play on and a giant, tree-hugging bug. If the artists are lucky, flowers will sprout on the art.

www.figmentproject.org

Big Bambú

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

1000 Fifth Avenue

Through October

Sculpture aficionados who visited the Met's Big Bambú exhibition on the roof when it opened last spring don't know the half of it. Literally. Designed to grow throughout the summer, the once 25-foot-high warren of bamboo poles designed by the Starn Brothers is now even taller, more labyrinthine and more intricate than ever. The truly unique artwork, made with the aid of rock climbers, is up only through October. Admission to the first level of the structure is free with museum admission. Tours of the super-structure are also free, but are timed, ticketed-and not for folks afraid of heights.

www.metmuseum.org

"Noguchi ReINstalled"

The Noguchi Museum

9-01 33rd Road,
Long Island City

Through Oct. 24

This Long Island City museum and garden, freshly renovated, is something of a sanctuary of sculpture. This particular show puts its entire collection on view for the first time since 2002. Using its photographic archives, the museum is displaying its spare, thoughtful and beautiful artworks as closely as possible to the way they were initially interpreted and presented by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The exhibition features the return of several big works from international collections, where they've been on loan, as well as significant recent acquisitions. (For true art immersion: It's also in the neighborhood as the impressive Socrates Sculpture Park.)

www.noguchi.org

Pratt Sculpture Park

200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn

Ongoing

The biggest sculpture garden in New York City, and one of the top 20 in the United States, is, surprisingly, at the Pratt Institute. Its sculpture park covers some 25 acres of the art school's Clinton Hill campus and is entering its 11th year. The sculpture exhibited in the space is changed on a regular basis, with new commissions and loans appearing alongside old-faithful pieces that have become part of the landscape. New work is almost always from the studios of well-known contemporary artists, such as Mark di Suvero and Robert Indiana.

www.pratt.edu

— David Dabill, founder of advertising firm Toy and "a native New Yorker accidentally born in Fargo, North Dakota" (it happens), has just bought a seventh-floor apartment at 105 Fifth Avenue, the former home of fluoro-loving Democratic Leadership Council chairman Harold Ford Jr. Mr. Dabill, who bought the $1.3 million loft space with JWT chief strategic officer Robin Bardolia, is one of the architects behind the Kindle’s commercial success and that Elf Yourself video your friends all sent you last Christmas.  

— AIG (that's Alternative Investment Group) chairman Stewart Greenfield, who apparently "divides his time between environmental activities and hedge fund investing," closed earlier this week on a $4.2 million apartment at 1016 Fifth Avenue, one of CityRealty's top 10 Fifth Avenue buildings. The ornately decorated home comes with its own library and wet bar and overlooks Central Park and Museum Mile.

PREVIOUSLY >  Will Balliett Buys Near Riverside; $5.25 M. Deal at 941 Park

ajulius@observer.com

- John Gans and wife Irina (nee Tolstoy) have sold their home at 941 Park Avenue, one of the Upper East Side’s most expensive buildings and the former stomping ground of Lloyd Blankfein, to Brian Fisher, about whom Google sheds no light. Mr. Fisher paid $5.25 million for the apartment, which comes with herringbone floors and two maid’s rooms. 

ajulius@observer.com

It's August. France and Italy beckon, and so do some blockbuster art shows. Wave to us, metaphorically at least, from the vaporetto.

"Paris Is Well Worth a Mass"

Galleria degli Uffizi

6 Piazzale degli Uffizi, Florence

Through Nov. 2

The Uffizi holds the world's largest collection of Renaissance painting and also its most popular. "Paris Is Well Worth a Mass" celebrates the life of King Henry IV of France, 400 years after his assassination, with canvases of the king's triumphs commissioned by the Medici family to sit on the walls of the church that hosted his funeral. Part of the exhibition is dedicated to the Medicis, including a Peter Paul Rubens drawing of Maria de Medici and several paintings and etchings.

www.uffizi.firenze.it

"Miró and Jan Steen"

Rijksmuseum

Jan Luijkenstraat 1, Amsterdam

Through Sept. 13

This is at least Joan Miró's second visit to Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum-the Surrealist painter traveled to view its collection of 17th-century art in 1928. There he saw the works of Jan Steen, a master of Dutch golden-age portraiture, and, historians say, took home with him a postcard of a Steen composition. Under this influence, Miró painted "The Dutch Interiors," a series of paintings that to many critics signifies the early stages of his career as a surrealist. For the first time here, the paintings and drawings of Steen and Miró go on view together, teasing out the effect of the Old Master on the influential Modernist.

www.rijksmuseum.nl

"Elles"

Centre Pompidou

Place Georges Pompidou, Paris

Through Feb. 21

The inside-out museum, whose escalators wind brightly around its exterior, is currently displaying the strongest works of the 20th- and 21st-century female artists in its collections. The women exhibited in this aesthetic "room of one's own" show include many of the world's most historically significant artists from Frida Kahlo and Tracy Emin to Marina Abramovic and Diane Arbus. One room on the fourth floor considers these artists' perception of the figure through life drawing, deconstructing the perception and objectification of the female body.

www.centrepompidou.fr

"Modern Times"

Neue Nationalgalerie

50 Potsdamer Straße, Berlin

Ongoing

As one of the six museums that make up the National Museum of Berlin, the Mies van der Rohe-designed Neue Nationalgalerie holds the city's Modern art collection, one of the biggest in Europe. The turn of the century through 1945 is the focus of this exhibition, which brings together Expressionist, Dada, Bauhuas and Surrealist works by predominantly German artists, in the city that has become a creative mecca over the past decade. Works by Edvard Munch, Paul Klee and Oskar Kokoschka compete with Anselm Kiefer and Wassily Kandinsky tableaux.

www.smb.museum

"Poetry and Dream"

Tate Modern

Bankside, London SE1

Ongoing

On the third level of the converted power station that now houses the Tate Modern, "Poetry and Dream" sweeps through the biggest names in Modern and contemporary art, taking in, among others, Giorgio de Chirico, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys, Kurt Schwitters, Joan Miró and Francis Bacon. The exhibit takes a chronological approach to the development of contemporary art, allowing you to walk through early Modern art into post-Surrealism-which features a startling, almost Cubist Jackson Pollock painting-culminating in a room filled with the works of Modern installationist Mona Hatoum.

www.tate.org.uk/modern

Virgin of the Rocks

The National Gallery

Trafalgar Square, London

Ongoing

Last month, Leonardo da Vinci's 15th-century masterpiece Virgin of the Rocks was put back on public view after a painstaking 18 months of cleaning and restoration. Stripped away: a yellowing layer of varnish that had been added nearly 70 years ago. The goal of an international team of scientists and artists was to bring the painting "closer to the artist's original intention," according to the museum. The restoration has led researchers to conclude that the entire painting, not just the central figures (as previously believed) was painted by the master.

www.nationalgallery.org.uk 

"The Moderna
Exhibition 2010"

Moderna Museet

Exercisplan 4, 111 49, Stockholm

Through Jan. 9

The follow-up to the museum's 2006 Modern art exhibit is unified by the artworks' relation to Sweden, rather than by any thematic impulse. The curators highlight the differences between contemporary Swedish artists as well as the similarities that create a national artistic identity. The artists whose work is exhibited are young, with many born in the 1970s and 1980s and others engaged in partnerships less than a decade old. The museum also has a brilliant permanent collection with works by Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg and Henri Matisse. www.modernamuseet.se

— Joel Ackerman, managing director at Warburg Pincus and board member at several other companies, according to Business Week, has bought on one of the Upper East Side’s most exclusive blocks. His new $7 million apartment at 17 East 79^th Street, which sits between Madison and Fifth avenues, puts him just feet away from fellow 79^th Street denizens Mayor Bloomberg, Eliot Spitzer and Art Garfunkel.   

— Another day, another loft-buying managing director. This time Goldman Sachs’ Ashot Ordukhanyan, who has purchased a $2.5 million apartment at 20-26 North Moore Street in Tribeca. The open-plan loft, which the listing assures us is “EXTRAORDINARY!,” occupies the entire fifth floor of the building. Mr. Ordukhanyan joins a wholly incongruous list of luminaries who have called the street home, among them Lindsay Lohan, the Ghostbusters, President Kennedy and Ice Cube.

ajulius@observer.com

— The Observer recently brought tidings of New Yorker-approved Gary Shteyngart's new Gramercy home. All Business magazine has its own 40 under 40, whose pages heralded Jerome McCluskey, an associate at Paul Weiss. Mr McCluskey and wife, Alexis Maybank, CSO of Gilt Groupe, recently spent $1.9 million on an apartment at 225 East 74th Street. 

ajulius@observer.com

— Vogue, French Elle and Bergdorf Goodman photographer Fabio Chizzola has purchased a Tribeca loft at 52 White Street. Mr. Chizzola, who is also the author of the image behind Jezebel’s greatest photoshop outrage, bought the modern apartment, which features an oversized bathroom and open-plan kitchen, for $1.925 million from Geoffrey Feldkamp, a former Lehman executive.

ajulius@observer.com

— The Du Pont dynasty has added a Park Avenue condo to its coffers and Jameson Du Pont, the great–many times–granddaughter of Huguenot watchmaker Pierre Samuel, will evade the couch-surfing legacy that befalls her fellow New York City interns this summer. The Du Pont alternative to the traditional graduate dwelling is a $1.055 million Gramercy apartment at the exclusive 260 Park Avenue South. Ms. Du Pont co-signed the deed with her father, Reynolds Du Pont Jr., who resides on Fishers Island.

The Du Pont family, whose net worth amounts to some $13 billion, once played a role in the Louisiana Purchase and currently includes or employs 25 percent of Delaware’s state Legislature, according to Time. A number of subsidiaries of the 200-year-old Du Pont company are based in New York, where Ms. Du Pont, who has a master's in sports leadership, has been interning in communications for Right to Play, an international non-profit organization that promotes sport as a means to social development.

Purchased from Diana Lugazzo, vice president of marketing at Calvin Klein, Ms. Du Pont’s new home is, according to an exaltation of a writeup at The New York Times, located in "arguably the chicest building on Park Ave South.” The listing also makes mention of a keypad system in each room of the apartment which allows streaming of an iPod playlist "at the touch of a button," and pictures show a sizeable bedroom and a bright, open-plan living room at the corner of the building. Further selling points: the lobby apparently "resembles an art gallery" while the bedroom has "a California Closet wardrobe system." And who can live without one of those?

ajulius@observer.com

— Isabel Gillies-Lattman, Law & Order actress and author of Starbucks' one-time favorite memoir, has moved further uptown to a four-bedroom apartment at 315 West 106^th Street with her busband, Wall Street Journal writer Peter Lattman. They paid $2,291,162.50 for the Rosario Candela-designed property which overlooks Riverside Park.

— Lawrence Leibowitz, COO of the New York Stock Exchange and one of the only people on earth who knows why the Jersey Shore cast members opened the market earlier this week (except maybe Hawaiian Tropic), has a new home in Tribeca at 48 Walker Street. Congratulations, Larry!

ajulius@observer.com