Notes from the Wunderground, and more

The biggest art event of the year in Boston was the December opening of the Institute of Contemporary Art's spectacular new building. With its boxy, top-heavy profile and its oddly blank, industrial-style street-side facade, the Diller, Scofidio + Renfro design is not beautiful, but standing alone on the edge of Boston Harbor, it makes a rousingly bold statement.

The $41 million building is a testament to the fund-raising skills and political tenacity of the ICA's director, Jill Medvedow. It's a sign, too, of how good the US economy has been for art in general.

In New York, where I lived before coming to work at the Globe in September, the art business is booming. There are now more than 300 galleries in Chelsea, Manhattan's bustling contemporary art district, where this year I saw one of the most disturbing exhibitions I have ever seen. In a cluttered and enveloping installation by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, photographs of people blown to bloody pieces by bombs in the Middle East were prominently displayed along with copies of drawings by the Swiss mystic and healer Emma Kunz. I hated the show when I saw it, but I'll never forget its brutal poetry of violence and transcendence.

Art about war in the Middle East has not been especially plentiful, but there have been notable exceptions. The sharply observed drawings made by the painter Steve Mumford while embedded with troops in Iraq, for example, were exhibited this fall at the Tufts University Art Gallery. At Marlborough Galleries in New York, Colombian artist Fernando Botero , who is best known for sweetly amusing pictures of people and animals made to appear extraordinarily fat, showed paintings and drawings envisioning the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Meanwhile, the most attention-getting exhibition of Boston's fall season was the abject capitulation of the Museum of Fine Arts to the Paris high-end apparel industry in "Fashion Show: Paris Collections 2006." That was depressing.

Those who think that art should question mainstream values could take heart from MIT's show about the conceptualist duo Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler , whose witty public works, made between 1985 and 1995, prompted alternative thinking about architecture and urban environments. And for a darkly comical and fiercely didactic exhibition at the Massachusetts College of Art, Sam Durant re-created dioramas from a defunct Plymouth wax museum in order to debunk deceptively benign myths about the Pilgrims and Indians.

The Rhode Island School of Design Museum offered another countercultural alternative with "Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the Present," which traced the evolution of a bohemian community centered around Fort Thunder, an artist-occupied old factory building. The show's wall-to-wall display of hand made posters advertising art exhibitions, rock shows, and theatrical events so vividly conjured the trippy atmosphere of the Fort Thunder scene, I wished I'd been part of it.

Three thematic exhibitions in Boston focused on the impact of new technologies on art: "Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology , and Contemporary Art" at MIT, "Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art" at the Rose Art Museum," and "Super Vision" at the ICA. All were admirable for their intellectual ambition and all featured compelling individual works. I recall a psychologically charged video travel diary by Sophie Calle at the Rose, Bruce Nauman's infrared video of his empty nighttime studio at MIT, and, at the ICA , a mysterious rectangle of red light hovering in a dark room by James Turrell.

On the other hand, "Crafty," a smart and engaging exhibition about contemporary artists using traditional crafts at the Massachusetts College of Art, proved that making art in old-fashioned ways need not lack conceptual or technical sophistication.

Painting is still doing well. One of the most talked-about shows in New York now is the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of that painter of supremely elegant abstractions, Brice Marden. And in Boston, the MFA produced a lively show of Expressionistic erotic paintings by the hot young British New Yorker Cecily Brown.

The best painting exhibitions that I saw locally, though, were of older work. The Addison Gallery of American Art organized an excellent survey of paintings that Jennifer Bartlett made on enameled steel plates from the late '60s to the late '70s, including her celebrated but rarely exhibited wrap around painting "Rhapsody." And the MFA's "Domains of Wonder" was a gorgeous, imaginatively enthralling exhibition of Indian miniatures dating from the 15th to the 19th century.

A note about my Top 10 list: Since I moved here only four months ago, it is weighted toward fall exhibitions. I've also added a short list of fondly recalled New York exhibitions. The latter are not ones that made front-page news. The shows I loved were often of more or less overlooked artists, like William Nicholson (1872-1949), a British realist painter with an exquisitely delicate touch, and Miyoko Ito (1918-1983), a Chicago-based painter of formally exacting, subtly luminous abstractions. Eugene Andolsek made densely worked, richly colored, mandala-like ink drawings until failing eyesight forced him to stop in 2003. Ron Nagle, an influential ceramist , specializes in eccentric and sumptuous cups. And Warren Isensee, a New York painter, creates optically riveting abstractions using geometric forms and patterns that recall Modernist aesthetics of the 1950s and '60s.

"A Four Dimensional Being Writes Poetry on a Field With Sculptures," a four-artist affair curated by California sculptor Charles Ray at Matthew Marks Gallery, included a monumental abstract sculpture by Mark di Suvero, biblical carvings by the folk artist Edgar Tolson, a skinny figure by Alberto Giacometti, and an enormous Jeff Wall photograph of a ventriloquist and his dummy entertaining a children's birthday party. I saw this enigmatic show as a meditation on sculpture as a kind of ventriloquism: the magical animation of otherwise inert matter. It's just that sort of offbeat provocation that keeps me in the game.

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.