Season highlights: Visual arts
"A Medieval Mystery: Who Is the Master of the Embroidered Foliage?" -- This is an art lover's whodunit. A 15th-century Netherlandish painter known only as "The Master of the Embroidered Foliage," because of the delicate detail of the leaves in his paintings, has traditionally been credited with five versions of "The Virgin and Child Enthroned." Contemporary scholars wonder whether it was the same artist who made all five, which is the reason the Clark Art Institute, owner of one of them, is gathering three others from Europe and America (the fifth is too frail to travel) for a side-by-side exhibition that will allow both the public and the experts to compare and contrast. The exhibition is at the Clark, in Williamstown, from Oct. 9-Jan. 2. 413-458-2303. www.clarkart.edu.
"Boris Mikhailov: A Retrospective." The Ukrainian photographer's first US retrospective comes to the Institute of Contemporary Art this fall. More than 500 of his photographs demonstrate a range of subjects from life under a totalitarian regime to the intimacies of the bedroom to an overcrowded Soviet-era beach where everyone would have been eligible for Weight Watchers. The show is at the ICA from Wednesday through Jan. 2. 617-266-5152. www.icaboston.org.
"Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum." Through complex, booklength circumstances, the Wadsworth is the repository of an amazing amount of 20th-century ballet material, including the collection that Serge Lifar, one of the last proteges of Ballets Russes impresario Serge Diaghilev, had to sell when a post-Diaghilev American tour met with financial ruin. The cast of characters in this show -- Lincoln Kirstein, George Balanchine, Isadora Duncan, Henri Matisse -- is a who's who of an era when dance, decor, and music collaborated as equals. The show is at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., from Sept. 25-Jan. 2. 860-278-2670. www.wadsworthatheneum.org.
"Cerith Wyn Evans." Wyn Evans is one of those contemporary artists who slides easily between media and also alludes to art of the past. For the 2001 William Blake exhibition at Tate Britain, he created an installation with Blake's poetry translated into Morse code and reflected off a disco ball. For his Boston show, his first solo US museum survey, he'll illuminate galleries with crystal chandeliers flashing Morse code versions of various texts. The exhibition is at the Museum of Fine Arts from Oct. 6-Jan. 30. 617-267-9300. www.mfa.org. Wyn Evans also shows work at MIT's List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge Oct. 7-Dec. 31. 617-253-4680. http://web.mit.edu/lvac.
"Huyghe + Corbusier: Harvard Project." Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts is the only building in North America designed by Le Corbusier. In honor of its 40th anniversary this year, the Harvard University Art Museums have commissioned Pierre Huyghe to create a multidisciplinary examination and tribute to the architecture that is such an anomaly in Harvard's brick and clapboard campus. Huyghe, recipient of the Guggenheim Museum's 2002 Hugo Boss Prize, is creating a puppet opera that tells the story of the Le Corbu commission, featuring marionettes designed by the great architect himself. Huyghe is also creating a temporary architectural extension to house the puppet opera and a video based on the work. The puppet opera will be performed on Nov. 18, and the video will be the centerpiece of an installation in the center's Sert Gallery, from Nov. 18-April 17. 617-495-9400. www.artmuseums.harvard.edu.
