Painting from "The King of Siam" exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum.

2) "Visions of Moby-Dick: 3 Contemporary Artists: Aileen Callahan, George Klauba, Mark Milloff" at the New Bedford Art Museum, New Bedford, MA, through September 2, 2005. This perfectly matched theme show for New Bedford features three responses to Herman Melville's classic tale. Aileen Callahan's intensely expressive abstractions deal with the book's raw emotions. George Klauba builds on the story's already rich symbolism by transforming Melville's characters into birds, while Mark Milloff creates a disjointed installation that combines his interest in African American music with pastels depicting fantastical scenes.

3) Videos by Oliver Herring at the MIT List Visual Arts Center's Media Test Wall, Cambridge, MA, through September 9, 2005. In Oliver Herring's short videos, all our dreams come true. "Numbers" presents a person who is buried in a whirlwind of dollar bills. In the charming "Dance," Herring shows us that even the most unlikely ballerinas can create a touching pas-de-deux. In "Spit," the childish temptation to turn one's mouth into a waterspout is transformed into a rapid-fire collage of people encouraged to do just that.

4) "Girls on Film" at the Sert Gallery in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, through September 18, 2005. "Girls on Film" is a revealing show about girls captured on celluloid that we never saw, unless the film projectionist slipped up. Julie Buck and Karin Segal, a pair of conservationists at the Harvard Film Archive, found and then restored dozens of images from film leaders. In doing so, they uncovered frames of anonymous women carefully posed with color strips, a common practice used to calibrate color balance and tone. Dubbed by the industry as "China Girls," these women's images were attached to films in America and abroad, from 1928 to 1992. With digitalization, the set-up came to an end. But, as the show provocatively suggests, "Who were these women? Why were they called 'China Girls?' Who set up these staged shots?" The answers -- or non-answers, as no one seems to remember -- suggest an insider's world, rife with sexist and racist overtones. Today, with so many women and Chinese making impressive directing debuts, it seems almost shocking that no one exposed this patronizing practice before.

5) "Ansel Adams: Celebration of Genius" at the University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, ME, through October 8, 2005. This exhibition, put together in 2002 by the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film to celebrate the centennial of Adams' birth, offers a look at a beautifully edited selection of Ansel Adams' photos from the 1920s through the 1960s. The show has a shorter running time than the one that opens later this month at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; so Adams' devotees take note. It's unlikely to have a pairing of two such shows any time soon.

6) "The Kingdom of Siam: The Art of Central Thailand, 1350-1800" at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, through October 16, 2005. The exhibit provides an extraordinary glimpse into the kingdom of Ayutthaya, known to foreigners as Siam, until its name changed to Thailand in 1939. This rich culture, nearly lost to the world after the Burmese invasion in 1767, is resurrected here through sculptures, textiles, illustrated manuscripts, and architectural fragments, revealing a cosmopolitan, tolerant and vital South East trading center. It is hard not to be moved by the impressive array of Buddhas and Hindu deities, nor is this a show to miss. The Peabody Essex is its only East coast venue.

7) Ansel Adams at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, through December 31, 2005. This exhibit of Adams' work, like the show in Maine, offers both recognizable and rarely seen photos. The Boston version, however, also includes video footage and one of Adams' cameras, which gives visitors an additional sense of the artist as well as the work. Drawn from the Museum's Lane Collection, the exhibit covers roughly the same period as the one in Maine and includes some of the same images, setting up an interesting comparison between the shows and their similar sets of prints.

8) "Sounds of the Silk Road: Musical Instruments of Asia" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, through January 5, 2006. If "The Kingdom of Siam: The Art of Central Thailand, 1350-1800" leaves you wanting to know more about that country and its regional neighbors, this show, which includes several recently donated Thai and Burmese instruments, is an excellent start.

MORE ARTS HEADLINES

	Curtains for Boston Costume			"So Much, So Fast"
	Anything But Ordinary			Roller Rink on Thin Ice

		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.