Walkabout: Francis Alys's peripatetic actions have won him acclaim on the global scene. A traveling exhibition surveys the career of this multifaceted artist, while a New York installation makes an artwork of his own unusual collection

While traveling early in his career, Alys began to notice paintings (and occasionally other artworks and objects) depicting St. Fabiola, and he commenced researching and collecting them. In almost all the works, the figure's appearance and pose are strikingly similar. You see the same beautiful young woman, in profile, wearing a red cloak with a hood drawn up; pensively, she gazes slightly upward. This oft-repeated image (and there are probably thousands of Fabiola paintings rattling around, constituting a Fabiola movement or subgenre operating entirely outside the art world) is not copied after a particularly renowned masterpiece, nor is it a portrait of a particularly famous saint. The story goes that Fabiola, born to a wealthy Roman family, was married to an abusive husband. She left him and took up with another man before her husband's death, which was allowable under Roman law but strictly prohibited by the Church. When her lover died, Fabiola underwent penitence, pledged herself to the Church and her wealth to the poor, and was eventually welcomed back into the fold as a model of virtue and humility.

Wealth, domestic violence, rebellion, risk, self-sacrifice and altruism could be the elements in a story for the ages (or the plot line in a soap opera, for that matter), but Fabiola was pretty much forgotten until a melodramatic 1854 novel by the British prelate Cardinal Wiseman rescued her from obscurity, turned her into a Victorian-era heroine and helped make her something of a cult figure. Henner painted the definitive version of Fabiola in 1885; that painting subsequently disappeared, though not before inspiring several copies. In a collective example of postmodern art-making, sans theory, the earnest painters in Alys's collection produced copies of copies based on a 19th-century French/British, image/text hybrid, a fictionalization of an early Christian woman from Rome.

Alys wanted to present his "Fabiola" installation not in a sleek and immaculate contemporary space, but in a museum setting heavy with history, and in the Hispanic Society he found the perfect fit. The museum, in an imposing and ornate Beaux-Arts building, owns a large collection of paintings, sculptures, objects and textiles from Spain, Portugal and Latin America, including masterworks by Goya, El Greco and Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida. Alys chose galleries paneled in dark wood that are normally reserved for 19th-century paintings, which makes sense conceptually, in that latter-day copies of a lost 19th-century original are returned, in a certain way, to their origins.

You enter the hushed, serious galleries to discover a crazy hodgepodge of Fabiolas on the walls, as if a deranged person had been set loose to decorate the space with the object of his or her obsession: big Fabiolas meticulously rendered in oil on canvas; flaking Fabiolas on wood panels; small Fabiola cameos; a Fabiola made of colored coffee beans and seeds; a Fabiola in needlepoint; a Fabiola hand-painted on a plate; Fabiolas presumably made in big cities by artists hunched in front of easels and Fabiolas made in dusty little villages. Styles and genres abound, from academic realism to caricature, folk art and photorealism. It appears that just about everything that has gone on before, in terms of art history, is still going on in this vast community of painters operating simultaneously not in the art world but in the wider world.