An air of excitement, but also uncertainty

For art lovers in Boston, 2005 has been a year of holding one's breath. The Institute of Contemporary Art continues construction of its new, 65,000-square-foot building designed by architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro; the opening is set for September. Soon the ICA, up until now a non-collecting institution, will announce the seed purchases of a new collection, which will herald the ideas and aesthetics of a bigger, and one hopes better, contemporary art museum.

The Museum of Fine Arts broke ground for its own new, Norman Foster-designed American Wing last month. Meanwhile, under the leadership of Malcolm Rogers, the MFA continued to pull out all the stops in hopes of luring larger audiences, mounting crowd-pleasing exhibits with questionable aesthetic and educational value -- shows that pushed the MFA closer to a theme park than a fine art museum.

In past years the pablum has included an exhibition about claymation darlings Wallace and Gromit and a dubious show of Herb Ritts's photography. This year, the MFA took one giant misstep with ''Things I Love: The Many Collections of William I. Koch," a valentine to the collector that reeked of Koch's ego and the MFA's obsequiousness. It's not impossible to put up shows that have wide appeal and strong aesthetics. This year the museum's ''Speed, Style and Beauty: Cars From the Ralph Lauren Collection" was acclaimed for both.

Despite all the flash and dazzle, the MFA also continued to do the laudable work of a major museum, staging scholarly, thoughtful, and impressive exhibitions. ''Ansel Adams," which closes there Jan. 4, leavens the glorious Adams standbys of mountains with less familiar photos, including portraits and more intimate landscapes featuring signs and derelict buildings. Adams's dedication to particularity drove even his most sweeping images and made him one of the great photographers of the 20th century.

''The Quilts of Gee's Bend," which stopped at the MFA over the summer, was a remarkable display of art made by poor black women in a remote Alabama community during the middle decades of the 20th century. They knew little about movements in the art world, but their quilts clamored with vitality, hooking into the rhythms of jazz and the visual aesthetics of Modernism. Their quilts could easily hang in a gallery beside works by Paul Klee and Robert Rauschenberg.

''DreamingNow," organized by Raphaela Platow at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, featured eight riveting and haunting installations. Works by artists such as Sandra Cinto, Cai Guo-Quiang, and Chiharu Shiota conjured the febrile, hallucinatory power of dreaming and questioned whether the dream world is any less authentic or reliable than the real one. Shiota's installation seemed to overtake the museum nightmarishly, with white beds tangled in skeins of black yarn appearing everywhere.

Speaking of fever dreams, the well-received ''Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague," at the Worcester Art Museum, examined not just the art that sprang up in response to the bubonic plague but the theology, medicine, and history of the time. The museum partnered with Clark University and the College of the Holy Cross and borrowed works from the National Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the show.

Witty and subversive, ''Christian Jankowski: Everything Fell Together," at the MIT List Visual Arts Center through Saturday, features a dozen film and video installations and more than 50 photographs. Jankowski, a German artist, looks at how certain groups -- contemporary artists or evangelical Christians, say -- define their worlds, and he playfully enters those worlds and tickles at their edges until they become tender and less defined. The gentle, comical results expose the child in everyone -- from magical thinking to the bright hope for connection.

The stirring and substantive ''Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile" at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown looked at the later paintings of the father of Neoclassicism, those that followed his involvement in the French Revolution. The show embraced the grand and the intimate and followed the complicated political allegiances and personal sorrows and triumphs of the great painter.

''Degas at Harvard," at the university's Arthur M. Sackler Museum, examined the work of that great artist through the lens of Harvard's collection, passionately cultivated through the first half of the 20th century by Paul Sachs, associate director of the Fogg Art Museum. The show, put together by Edward Saywell and Stephan Wolohojian, was intimate but impassioned, conveying Degas's restlessness, drive, and extraordinary versatility.

The Boston University Gallery, under the stewardship of Stacey McCarroll, has this year ably presented shows that have both significant ties to the university and wide appeal. ''David Aronson: A Retrospective" was an overview of the figurative work of a member of the so-called Boston School of Expressionist painting, which thrived in the mid-20th century. Aronson, a BU professor, also founded the BU Art Gallery. ''Syncopated Rhythms: 20th-Century African American Art From the George and Joyce Wein Collection," up through Jan. 22, is a riotous, bluesy exhibition of work collected by BU alum and music impresario Wein and his late wife.

Photographer Alex MacLean's ''Airlines" exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum, also up through Jan. 22, takes a bird's-eye view of the landscape. MacLean flies around in a small plane, leaning precariously out the window to shoot what he sees below. His photographs reveal surprising patterns that touch on formal abstraction without losing sight of the very real moored boats and wheat fields he shoots.

Finally, as the ICA constructs its new home, it invited Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn to completely transform its existing galleries. His ''Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress" so disrupted the space that it violated fire codes, and the ICA had to shut down for a while last month. Somehow, that chaos fits with the havoc Hirschhorn purposely created in his installation, which cleverly dizzied the viewer as its focus spun from war to fashion to philosophy.