Art scene blossoms around the city

The gallery scene on Harrison Avenue went from burgeoning to explosive this year when developer GTI Properties completed renovations on the old warehouse that first attracted art dealers in the late 1990s. The 450 Harrison Ave. building, which runs along Thayer Street, now has a mezzanine level with a catwalk leading to a handful of galleries and a street-level walkway to galleries as well.

Many of the dealers (Allston Skirt, Genovese/Sullivan, galleryKayafas, to name a few) in the newly renovated spaces had been showing art upstairs, waiting for more than a year to move to a more accessible location. Others, like Samson Projects, Locco Ritoro Gallery, and BF Annex, just opened this year.

Still others remain squirreled away on the third floor (Gallery Katz, osp gallery, Clifford-Smith Gallery, OH+T Gallery); if you visit, don't miss them. Down Harrison Avenue a block or two, Boston Sculptors Gallery opened a gorgeous space in August, finally settling into a new home after more than a year of being a nomad.

The scene sizzles, with hundreds of visitors showing up early to Friday night opening receptions each month. Samson Projects and Locco Ritoro Gallery have plans to capitalize on the buzz by doing more than showing art -- bringing in live music and setting up other events, like fashion shows and lectures.

There are a few flies in the ointment. Harrison Avenue, with its looming brick edifices and lack of storefront space, doesn't invite pedestrian traffic. Although there are a lot of art galleries, there are a dearth of coffee shops and clothing stores, the sort of respite from the art that a true commercial street -- like, say, Newbury Street -- provides. And with 20 galleries in 450 Harrison Ave. alone, has the area reached critical mass? With so much art to see and buy down there, how can they possibly all sustain themselves?

The gallery scene on Newbury Street has not lessened. Barbara Krakow Gallery, the Nielsen Gallery, and Howard Yezerski Gallery (and Bernard Toale Gallery on Harrison Avenue) consistently exhibit the strongest work in Boston. Meanwhile, art spaces are also popping up off the beaten track -- Alternate Currents on State Street and the Gallery Artist Studio Projects in Brookline, among others, are venues to keep an eye on.

Elsewhere, Provincetown had an outstanding summer. The Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) is in the throes of renovating its gallery spaces -- it should be finished next year. The progress as of last August suggests that the former ragtag museum will soon be a showplace worthy of Provincetown's long-thriving arts community.

As for the artists, many of this year's outstanding exhibits were those of old favorites. Joel Meyerowitz showed at PAAM his epic color photographs of the work at ground zero after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Also in P-town, Paul Resika's chapel-like installation of paintings at the Berta Walker Gallery was an oasis of color and light. Just before painter Leon Golub died, the Fine Arts Work Center put together a small show of his drawings paired with the work of his wife, Nancy Spero. The two were masculine and feminine iconographies butting heads: Spero's women delighting in themselves and their sexuality; Golub's men immersed in anger and angst.

John Walker's paintings at the Nielsen Gallery in November again demonstrated what a maestro he is with his materials and how lucky we are to have him in Boston. Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons's stunning photographic assemblage ''Elevata," at Howard Yezerski Gallery, took her work to a new level visually, thematically, and technically. Photographer Laura McPhee teamed with her husband, filmmaker Mark LaPore, to create a hybrid: framed films, haunting the Bernard Toale Gallery's walls.

Three younger artists had outstanding shows. Hannah Burr's exhibit at Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art proves her to be a consistently deep and challenging painter of beautiful abstract work. Catlin Rockman's paintings at Green Street Gallery were a lowbrow spectacle of highbrow technical artistry. They depicted buxom female action figures with a virtuosity that addressed a host of questions that rise in 21st-century art. Tanya Steinberg's heart-rending paintings at the Nielsen Gallery set contemporary images cadged from newspaper photos in the framework of the Stations of the Cross, the chapters in the story of Christ's crucifixion. Making political art that is not shrill or vacuous is a feat indeed; Steinberg's work did not blame or judge, it merely sparked compassion.

It's heartening that the best work by young artists this year was all in paint -- Burr's abstractions, Steinberg's narratives, and Rockman's blend of the two. Technology drives a lot of new art, but painting continues to renew itself and go deeper.