Roe Ethridge, County Line Mall Sign, 2004.

1) "Gone: Site-Specific Works by Dorothy Cross" at the McMullen Museum of Art, Chestnut Hill, MA, through July 12, 2005. Dorothy Cross is one of the most tantalizing installation artists around. Her pieces are large scale, both in terms of scale and theme, which makes this show both eagerly awaited and problematic at the same time. In this exhibition we are invited to reconstruct the original impact of Cross's pieces through photographs and relic-like objects. Cross's ideas are brilliant, but the show ultimately leaves you painfully aware of the distance between the experience of a work and the documentation of it.

2) "Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest/Photography by James Balog" at the McMullen Museum of Art, Chestnut Hill, MA, through July 12, 2005. James Balog's photos of trees cut straight to their essence. Beautifully shot and then collaged in a cubistic fashion, Balog's photos reflect the trees' beauty, character, and all of our romantic longings and projections on to nature.

3) "Anri Salan: Dammi I Colori" at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA through July 31, 2005. Anri Salan's video unfolds like a children's story. In the old and beleaguered Albanian city of Tirana, everything seems tired and grey. Then one day, the mayor, who is also an artist-comes up with an idea to transform the bleak capital into a bold, new world. Armed with buckets of paint, workers descend upon concrete facades, turning them into lively blocks of color. What makes this piece so mind-blowing is that this video does not chronicle a fairytale, but a fact.

4) "Xavier Veilhan: The Photorealist Project" at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA, through July 31, 2005. Photorealist paintings replicate our world in two-dimensional planes. Veilhan's grand-scaled installation does the same to us. In a small house-sized enclosure, whose interior lights suggest a stage set, viewers are mirrored in the space's black walls. Around the darkened bends, the structure is punctuated by hyper- realistic paintings, which lead you from the Platonic cave of shadows back into the large, lit world of the museum. Provocative metaphors abound, although the slick packaging threatens to negate deep engagement with the issues at hand.

5) "The 2005 DeCordova Annual Exhibition" at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, through July 31, 2005. This year's DeCordova's annual is one of the best, including sculptures, installations, paintings, photographs, and videos by Jean Blackburn, Lalla A. Essaydi, Milan Klic, Michael Lewy, Sally Moore, Laurie Sloan, Barbara Takenaga, Nao Tomii, Nadya Volicer and Mark Wethli. From the works here, one can trace a lineage to such international figures as Takashi Murakami, the late Gordon Matta-Clark, Shirin Neshat and Sarah Sze. The show's broad engagement with the larger global art scene is a welcome change from the regionalism that typically pervades these kinds of shows.

6) "Momentum 4: Roe Ethridge" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, through September 5, 2005. Whether it's your local strip mall or the girl behind the counter, Roe Ethridge treats every aspect of the everyday with psychological neutrality, crystallizing the banal. His color photographs represent time captured, frozen and now gone, but faintly familiar -- like old snapshots rediscovered. The effect is disturbingly charged: A whiff of nostalgia pervades the work -- a sad, lingering desire to retreat from the present tense.

7) "The Secret Ark of Icon Park" at the Charlestown Navy Yard, Boston, MA (a project of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art) through October 10, 2005. Jerry Beck, that tireless champion of the arts, who founded and directs the lively Revolving Museum, finally gets a stellar chance to showcase his own artistic talents. As this year's Institute of Contemporary Art's Artist-in-Residence, Beck uses his usual palette of the world's cast-offs to create a modern day Noah's Ark. The resulting interactive is part fun house, part escapist retreat, and part serious commentary on the state of the world today.

8) "Asaraton" at Haymarket (along the Freedom Trail), Boston, MA, re-installed permanently. The Big Dig not only disrupted traffic patterns but displaced one of the city's most beloved public art works, "Asaraton," which means unswept floor. Artist Mags Harries' array of street litter, such as discarded lettuce leaves and paper bags, has been cast in bronze and then embedded in the sidewalk. Commissioned in 1976 by the City of Boston and the Massachusetts Bicentennial Commission, the piece was moved to make way for the Big Dig, but it has now re-appeared, with new bits of "debris" added.

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		Arts Features Films at the Gate Photos See photos of kung-fu movies and former Boston Chinatown movie theater locations. Guerrilla Art See photos of local artist Matthew Hincman's bench-like sculpture. "O" is for Original Local artist "Danny O" portrays whimsical scenes of summer in Boston. Multimedia Singer at 100 An exclusive online special explores the controversial work and life of Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. Gauguin's Tahiti Paintings Take a multimedia tour of Paul Gauguin's Tahiti paintings, including the famous painting, "Where Are We From." Hawthorne at 200 View a multimedia celebration of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 200th birthday.