12 Art Gallery Gems in Eastern Massachusetts

Do you live in New England or are you visiting the Boston area? Have you already plumbed the depths of Boston's superb Museum of Fine Arts, and want to try something different? If so, here are a dozen Eastern Massachusetts art galleries and museums that you must not miss:

• Cape Ann Museum of Art, History, and Culture (Gloucester)--This engaging museum focuses on art, history, and culture in Boston's North Shore area. Its collection includes paintings and artifacts from the area's maritime past, portraits by Gilbert Stuart, and (especially) works by the many artists who visited the Cape Ann area, including William Morris Hunt, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Maurice Prendergast , and Fitz Henry Lane (commonly misnamed "Fitz Hugh Lane"). A superb exhibit profiles the "Folly Cove Designers," a guild of designer-craftsmen in Gloucester who remained active from 1938 until 1969, when its founder passed away. It showcases their printed paper and textiles, linoleum block prints, and utilitarian items made from their fabrics. The adjacent Captain Elias Davis House (1804) illustrates domestic life in the early 19th century. And to celebrate the area's history as a granite supplier, the museum created a sculpture garden that may be the last project of any size to use native Cape Ann stone. (www.capeannhistoricalmuseum.org)

• Danforth Museum of Art (Framingham)-- The Danforth focuses on American art from the 18th century on, and stages imaginative exhibits by emerging and established artists of all ages, in both old and new media. But a clear specialty has to be the school of "Boston Expressionism" represented by 20th-century artists David Aronson, Jason Berger, Hyman Bloom, Jack Levine, and Arthur Polonsky. The museum holds about 400 studio-art courses, family workshops, and artist lectures each year. (www.danforthmuseum.org)

• Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College (Wellesley)--Many universities have art galleries. But the 120-year-old Davis is a standout among local treasures. We may have visited it more than any other museum in this list, because of such intriguing, unique exhibits as "The Prints of Durer and Titian," the "Provincetown School of Printers," "Boston's Arts & Crafts Movement," and "Cold-War-Modern Design." The museum's permanent collection contains 10,000 ancient to contemporary sculptures, paintings, decorative objects, and works on paper. There's a strong focus on European and North American art, but the collection also includes African, South American, and Asian arts. The DMCC's modern building is itself a work of art. Created by Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Rafael Moneo, it was his first commission in North America. (www.wellesley.edu/DavisMuseum)

• DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (Lincoln)--The DeCordova is located on the former estate of Julian de Cordova (1851-1945), a self-educated son of a Jamaican merchant, who himself became a successful tea broker and president of a local glass manufacturer. Much like the Barnes Foundation in Merion PA (just outside Philadelphia), the DeCordova originated from its founder's passion for both travel and the use of art as a tool for "self-improvement and enlightenment." De Cordova gave his estate to the town of Lincoln in 1930, and stipulated that after his death, it would become a public art museum under the direction of qualified professionals. So when independent appraisers determined that de Cordova's original collection was "not of substantial interest or value," the museum's trustees were still able to honor de Cordova's intent while turning the museum into something New England needed: a home for contemporary New England (and other American) art. In additional to its indoor exhibits, the museum enjoys one of the region's leading collections of modern and contemporary American sculpture (with 80 works arranged across 35 acres of grounds)...the only permanent public sculpture park in New England at this time. (www.decordova.org)

• Fitchburg Art Museum (Fitchburg)-- North Worcester County's oldest cultural institution was founded in 1925 through a bequest of native artist and educator, Eleanor Norcross. A "liberated" woman-of-the-world before the terms were even invented, she crossed the Atlantic 24 times, lived in Paris for 40 years, and exhibited 10 times in Paris's Fall Salon. Norcross was also one of the few women to endow a museum with both money and a collection. Today, the Fitchburg's 14 galleries offer American and European paintings, prints, drawings, ceramics, and decorative arts...plus Greek, Roman, Asian and pre-Columbian antiquities (many from Norcross's charter collection). The museum also stages temporary exhibits of works from other museums, private collections, and emerging and established contemporary artists. (www.fitchburgartmuseum.org)

• Fuller Craft Museum (Brockton)-If you love fine craftsmanship, you simply must point your car south of Boston and visit the Fuller. Recently profiled on PBS, its traveling and permanent collections display an ever-changing variety of high-end work. When we last visited, we saw premier Native American beadwork and woven rugs; works by modern masters like Carder, Chihuly, Esherick, Maloof, Nakashima, Ohr, Saarinen, Tiffany, and Voulkos; newer contemporary glass, pottery, furniture, metalwork, jewelry, and fabric art; and a few pieces that simply defied categorization (like a realistic box of candy exquisitely rendered in wrapped silk). The museum also hosts events, workshops, and master classes to "inspire people of all ages and artistic abilities to enhance their lives through an intimacy with craft." (www.fullercraft.org)

• Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester)-- Born in 1903, Massachusetts native Arthur Griffin originally trained as an illustrator. But in 1929, he picked up a folding Brownie camera, and by the mid-1930's, he was the exclusive photographer for the newly created Boston Globe Rotogravure Magazine and the New England photojournalist for both Life and Time Magazine. He pioneered the use of color film and took the first color photographs to appear in the Saturday Evening Post. His last years were spent in the picturesque town of Winchester, where he founded this charming museum on Shore Road by the Aberjona River. The Museum profiles Griffin's work (including his famous photos of baseball great Ted Williams)...plus that of today's up-and-coming photographers. Its new Executive Director, Paula Tognarelli, has staged branch exhibits in the Stoneham Theater and Winchester's Aberjona River Gallery, and begun to organize traveling exhibits to other venues. (www.griffinmuseum.org)

• Harvard Art Museum (Cambridge)--This is the new collective name for Harvard University's three major art museums: the Arthur M. Sackler, Busch-Reisinger, and Fogg. The Sackler offers Chinese jades, bronzes, ceramics, ancient ceremonial weapons, and Buddhist cave-temple sculptures; Japanese surimono, woodblock prints, calligraphy, narrative paintings, and lacquer boxes; Korean ceramics; paintings, drawings, and calligraphy from Iran, India, and Turkey; and America's most important teaching collection of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Near Eastern art. The Busch-Reisinger is the only museum in America devoted to art of Central and Northern Europe, with an emphasis on post-war and contemporary art from German-speaking countries. The Museum has a leading collection of modern art from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and related cultures, with important Austrian Secession art, German Expressionism, 1920s Abstraction, and Bauhaus materials (including the archives of Lyonel Feininger and Walter Gropius). However, late Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque sculptures; 16th-century paintings; and 18th-century porcelains are also represented. And the Fogg (the oldest of the three) surrounds a reproduced Italian Renaissance courtyard, with galleries of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present (especially Italian early Renaissance, British pre-Raphaelite, and nineteenth-century French). It also boasts one of America's finest holdings of Impressionist and post-Impressionist work, including the Boston area's most important Picasso collection. (www.artmuseums.harvard.edu)

• Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) (Dedham and Somerville)-- Need a break from the BEST the art world has to offer? Then, my friend, this place is for you! It's "the world's only museum dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition, and celebration of bad art in all its forms." And yep, many of its acquisitions (from dumps, yard sales, auctions, thrift shops, trash bins, back alleys, and even artist donations) are unapologetically awful. But others ain't really so bad. Overall, though, MOBA's collection is truly "Art too bad to be ignored." Their permanent galleries are suitably hidden in the basements of two old theaters: just outside the men's room in the Dedham Community Theater (Dedham, Mass.) and equally convenient to the restrooms in the basement of the Somerville Theater (Davis Square, Somerville Mass.). In both locations, admission is "free" with the purchase of a movie ticket, and theater staff can often be persuaded to cough up their own artistic interpretations. How 'bout some REAL "Outsider Art"?......Anyone?...... (www.museumofbadart.org)

• National Heritage Museum (Lexington)-- This tribute to American art and history was founded during the 1976 Bicentennial by the 32nd Scottish Rite Freemasons, who continue to support it. The museum's very broad charter includes anything about American life over the past four centuries....from the American Revolution and Paul Revere (whose Midnight Ride took him past the museum's present site), to neon signs, post cards, Art-Deco diners, folk art, Route 66, and World War posters. The 16,000 Masonic and American objects in their collection include the only 18th-century 15-star American flag on public display outside the Smithsonian. Theirs is also one of the best shops around for buying educational gifts for kids of any age. (www.monh.org)

• Peabody-Essex Museum (Salem)-- Founded in 1799, the PEM stakes its claim as the oldest continuously operating museum in the country. But it's also thoroughly modern and architecturally striking. The open-plan main building reminds one of a glass-bottomed sailing ship turned upside down. A new wing was recently designed by the preeminent architect Moshe Safdie. But at the other end of the time spectrum, the museum's "Yin Yu Tang" is a complete Qing Dynasty merchant's house that the PEM moved from southeastern China and rebuilt in its own courtyard. This further strengthened the reputation of the PEM's Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian collections, which include some of the earliest Native American and Oceanic art in the U.S. The PEM's 854,000-item collection and 22 historic buildings (ten of them National Historic Landmarks or National Register buildings) span 300 years of New England history. (www.pem.org)

• Whistler House Museum of Art (Lowell)-- The early modernist American artist James McNeill Whistler was born in this house, and his mother, Anna Whistler, appears here in an exact copy of the original "Whistler's Mother" (the original hangs in Paris's Musee D'Orsay). Displayed throughout the house's rooms, the WHMA's permanent collection spans both 19th and early 20th century New-England Representational artists, such as Frank W. Benson, Arshile Gorky, George Loftus Noyes, Harold C. Dunbar, William Preston Phelps, Frederick Porter Vinton, Louis Kronberg, William Morris Hunt, Thomas Bayley Lawson, and Whistler. It also contains a selection of etchings by Whistler himself, who some consider to be the finest etcher since Rembrandt. For the past few years, the museum has also staged a series of art-quilt shows, among many other events. (www.whistlerhouse.org)