The Scion Installation 4 is an art tour representing the work of a variety of contemporary artists like Jeff Soto, Blek Le Rat, Caia Koopman (see above), Dalek, Sage Vaughn among others. The tour, is in its fourth year, and this year’s theme is “It’s a Beautiful World”. Featured will be works of painting, photography, collage and sculpture. There are nine tour stops and when the Installation Tour 4 ends up at the final stop in Los Angeles, all the works will be auctioned with the proceeds going to charity. The Miami stop, mid-way through the tour, during this week’s Art Basel, will feature six balloons, 8-ft in diameter, custom-designed for the event by six of this year’s artists. Also featured will be three custom-designed Scion art cars. The tour hits the Raleigh Hotel in Miami on Thursday, December 7.

Artists: various
+ scion.com/installation

The Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City presents a before-and-after charity auction for the Alliance for Children’s Rights. Over 100 vintage paint-by-numbers have been transformed into new works by a wide array of artists to be auctioned off on-line on ebay for Charity By Numbers. What’s old is new again.

For a unique spin on fundraising, 50 sets of customized matryoshka dolls will be auctioned off tonight in Antwerp to raise money for the Red Cross. The dolls, designed by graphic designers, street artists, fashion designers, contemporary artists and jewellery designers, are anything but typical Russian issue. The sets of five have been stacked as totems, broken to bits and stowed in a jar, and re-assembled as a leisure time bear. They represent stitched felt families, bow-tied waiters, and any number of hard-to-pinpoint characters derived from the Belgian imagination. D-I-Y stacking dolls may be baboushka-free from now on.

Artist: various
+ m-a-f.be

Canadian blood artist Istvan Kantor is at it again. Banned from the National Gallery of Canada for painting a large blood x on a gallery wall in 1991, Kantor has come up with a project for the transformation of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto � adding his own blood to the concrete to ensure that the museum truly contains artists� blood. In doing so the building itself becomes the art and the title of this piece is Invisible Gift. While Kantor�s Blood Campaign series has been going on for years, Kantor is also busy with other areas of his performance art, especially as far as furthering the cause of neoism is concerned. The AGO has in no way given Kantor the green light, but he is ever the optimist and will reveal more at a press conference at Toronto�s Drake Hotel on Aug. 2.

Artist: Istvan Kantor
+ ccca.ca

The cachet of owning or creating original artwork has always been sought after, but now the non-artist can readily combine true ownership and authorship by having one-of-a-kind pieces of art produced from his or her DNA, thanks to DNA11, a unique company offering portraits taken from clients� DNA. DNA11�s official launch took place on Friday with the unveiling of a piece commissioned for Absolut Vodka. DNA was taken from the fruit used in five different flavours of the Absolut Vodka and the resulting DNA prints were incorporated into a spectacular fifteen-foot light box housed in the disco of Ottawa nightspot Helsinki Bar & Lounge.

Artist: Adrian Salamunovic/Nazim Ahmed/Sacha Leclair
+ dna11.com

Smilingdisease is a website and art project dedicated to the dissemination of smilingdisease stickers and postcards. The stickers are meant to turn up anywhere and everywhere, all over the world. The postcards are blank on one side for the grassroots artist to have the freedom to create a drawing, painting, collage, whatever and send it back in to smilingdisease where it will be featured on the website, and perhaps later in an exhibition and eventually in book form. What could be more modern and contemporary than art from the people?

Curator: Scott Larkin
+ smilingdisease.org

Delete! � Delettering the Public Space is a huge public installation that takes place on Neubaugasse in Vienna�s 7th District from June 6 � 20. During this two-week period, all signage will be covered by yellow foils and plastic. All signage (barring those needed for safety), company logos, advertising, symbols and pictograms will be obscured in order to focus on various aspects to this art project organized by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf. Will the Viennese be lost in time and space without the media-driven bearings they have come to expect?

Artist: Christoph Steinbrener & Rainer Dempf
+ steinbrener-dempf.com