Front Row: Visual Arts

"Tara Donovan": This American artist finds a hidden life in substances the rest of us might think destined for the trash heap. In 2003, she suspended a vast globular sculpture, made from Styrofoam cups and hot wax, from the ceiling of a gallery, backlighting it to gorgeous effect. Again and again, she has roped together mundane objects with accidental-seeming phenomena to create formally satisfying sculptures, and her upcoming survey show at the Institute of Contemporary Art promises to be entrancing. Oct. 10-Jan. 4. 617-478-3100, www.icaboston.org

"Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective": Most museum exhibitions stay on display for two to four months. Mass MoCA's retrospective of Sol LeWitt's wall drawings, which runs until 2033, bucks the trend somewhat. It's going to be extraordinary. Three stories and 27,000 feet of the museum's North Adams campus have been put aside for this display of more than 50 large-scale wall drawings. Executed by teams of assistants according to precise mathematical instructions, they were conceived by LeWitt, the trail-blazing minimalist and conceptualist, between 1968 and last year, when he died at 78 (after selecting and sequencing the works for this show himself). The exhibition was organized with the Yale University Art Gallery and the Williams College Museum of Art, which will host a complementary show, "ABCDs of Sol LeWitt"(Nov. 14-May 17). Opens Nov. 16. 413-662-2111, www.massmoca.org

"Art and Empire: Treasures From Assyria in the British Museum": Thirty monumental wall reliefs depicting military campaigns and lion hunts from the Ancient Near East - the cradle of civilization - will be among the highlights of this magisterial exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. The display of art from palaces and temples in present-day Iraq will include 150-odd objects, ranging from massive stone sculptures to amulets and small cylindrical seals. They were made between the ninth and seventh centuries BC for powerful kings and were intended to impress - if not subdue. Sept. 21-Jan. 4. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org

"Chihuly at RISD": The Rhode Island School of Design in Providence will inaugurate its new Chace Center, designed by Spain's Pritzker Prize-winning architect José Rafael Moneo, with a massive installation of hand-blown glass by Dale Chihuly, the world's most famous glass artist. Chihuly received his MFA at RISD in 1968 and helped establish a glass department at the school the year after his graduation; he continued to teach there sporadically until the late 1980s. Chihuly's large-scale works recall botanical and marine forms. This installation in a new special exhibitions gallery of the RISD Museum will be complemented by works in glass by artists who were students at RISD at the same time or after Chihuly. Sept. 27-January 2009. 401-454-6500, www.risd.edu

"Rachel Whiteread": One of the most critically acclaimed of the generation of so-called Young British Artists who came to prominence in the 1990s, Whiteread made her reputation with solid casts, in intriguingly textured substances such as concrete or resin, of the negative spaces created by solid objects: the underside of a staircase, for instance, or the interior of a whole house. For this show at the Museum of Fine Arts she will be presenting a large installation, "Place (Village)," of 200 vintage dollhouses collected by the artist over two decades. The show will be complemented by six sculptures and 15 drawings. Oct. 15-Jan. 25. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org

SEBASTIAN SMEE