Artwork by Jessica Stockholder.

1) "Jessica Stockholder: Rawhide Harangue of Aching Indices as Told by Light" at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts' Grossman Gallery, Boston, MA through October 21, 2005. Although it is now commonplace to see paintings on material other than canvas, Stockholder gets the credit for helping launch that Neo-Baroque leap. She applies the techniques of painting to everyday items, creating two new works in Boston, each specific to their place. The artist also will be giving a free public talk at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts on October 6th, 2005 at 6 pm.

2) "Resurfaced" at the Boston University Art Gallery, Boston, MA through October 30, 2005. "Resurfaced" looks at where painting has gone, once people like Stockholder and Sam Gilliam (who is in this show) shook painting from its tradition-bound structure of being a flat, two-dimensional surface. With works by a number of area artists including Sam Cady, Gina Ruggeri, Katy Stone, Jennifer Riley, Bill Thompson and Roger Tibbets, Boston just might be the place where painting re-invents itself.

SUITS: The Clothes Make the Man, 1998 View more images from the October picks

3) "Pattern Language: Clothing as Communicator" at the Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, MA, through November 13, 2005. Curated by independent curator Judith Fox, this exhibit looks at fashion as a statement -- a statement about culture, one's self, human nature and psychology. Including both historical and contemporary work, as well as newly commissioned pieces by artists as well known as Joseph Beuys, Rosemarie Trockel, The Art Guys, Vito Acconci, Yoko Ono and Krzysztof Wodiczko, alongside work by new and emerging artists, this exhibit is intelligently presented, provocatively playful and delightful interactive. It has been a long time since we've been treated to such a thoughtful and engaging undertaking.

4) "Variations on a Theme by Sol LeWitt & Paula Robison" at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, through November 13, 2005. The late Mrs. Gardner collected art, artifacts, decorative objects, letters, books, music -- and their creators. Her home was as well known as a repository of beauty as a place for performance, a reality that this show revives. Two artists -- the ever-engaging Sol LeWitt and the flutist Paula Robison -- have created works that celebrate their love of music, and Mozart in particular. LeWitt is represented by one of his rigorously constructed, elegant abstract, wall paintings. Also, Robison and other musicians supply live music as an aural accompaniment. The marriage is an exquisite delight.

5) Julian Opie's "Suzanne Walking, Paul Walking" at the future Institute of Contemporary Art, Fan Pier, Boston, MA, October 6 through 31, 2005. Nothing is more eagerly awaited in the Boston art world than the unveiling of the Institute of Contemporary Art's new building next year. In the meantime, there's the impressive construction to ogle. And, now, in the museum's soon-to-be-entrance, there's a piece by Julian Opie, which consists of two stylized figures, animated with LEDs, whose arms and legs move, but appear to have no desire to go anywhere else.

6) "Fred Tomaselli: Monsters of Paradise" at the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, through December 11, 2005. Fred Tomaselli's hallucinatory images are as freaky as the media in which he works. Although at a distance, the pieces look like elaborate paintings, up close they reveal themselves to be mind-boggling collages, made up of pills, photos, and medicinal herbs encased in resin. Although the resulting surfaces are reminiscent of Asian lacquer work, the imagery more readily suggests altered states of minds than anything of this earth.

7) "Aaron Noble: Site-Specific Lobby Wall Project" at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, through December 20, 2005. Melding his love of super heroes, collage, and community murals, Noble has created a wall painting that is very hard not to like. The imagery seems vaguely figurative -- which is not surprising given that the creatures are made up of bits and pieces of comic book pictures. Still that doesn't prepare you for the rich, bold colors, inventive morphing, and the sheer energy that Noble's painted frame can barely contain. And there are also the slippages of color and spatial riffs, which play up the piece's cobbled together incarnation. To call the work exuberant would be an understatement.

8) "Acting Out: Invented Melodrama" in Contemporary Photography at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY, through December 31, 2005. About the same time that reality TV invaded the airwaves, it turned up in artworks, especially photography. Like its guache TV counterpart, the reality featured in the photographs was often melodramatic, extreme, even verging on the grotesque. With thirty-one pictures by such well-known artists as Anna Gaskel, Gregory Crewdson, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia this show explores how a single constructed image can convey the emotional weight of our own century's fin-de-siecle angst.

9) "Flights of Fancy/Artist Made Kites" at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA, through January 15, 2006. What could be a better fall show, than that of kites and the flights that they inspire? And what could be a better site than the Art Complex Museum with its soaring ceiling and bucolic setting? Including kites from as far away as Montana (by John Pollock, the reigning Grand National Kite Building Champion) to as close to home as the Boston Children's Museum, the show presents both kites that actually soar and those that, instead, satisfy our dreams of flight.

10) "Post and After: Contemporary Art form the Brandeis University Collection" at the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, through April 9, 2006. Curated by the Rose's Luce Scholar Katy Siegel, this show tries to suggest an alternative to 'post-modernism'-- that term which was bantered about in the '90s to describe art that was lifted freely from art historical periods. Today, with 'post-modernism' fading from use, we're left in a kind of limbo. We still lack an appropriate term for the work Siegel has amassed.

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