The most exotic destination you can visit this summer is in Massachusetts at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem. The featured exhibition, “Fiery Pool: The Maya and The Mythic Sea,” captures the excitement and essence of the ancient American civilization in a dramatic new way.

At its zenith, between 300 and 900 A.D., the Maya civilization comprised about 2,000,000 people in hundreds of cities across Mexico and Central America. They spoke several dialects of the same language. It was the only literate society in pre-Columbian America and scribes were such an important social class that some were chosen from among the younger sons of the royal families. The Mayans also had developed highly-advanced systems of mathematics, astronomy, architecture, and art as well as a complex religion.

At five tons, the pale pink cube that dominates the lobby at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, may be the largest, heaviest piece of glass ever cast. Then again, maybe it’s not. The art in the museum’s latest exhibition, titled “Roni Horn A.K.A. Roni Horn,” is ambiguous.

Horn’s art is up close and personal. You can’t fully experience “Pink Ton,” labeled “Untitled (Aretha),” from across the gallery. Nor can you just walk around it. To appreciate the sculpture, you have to peer over the side and look into it. Despite first appearances, the cube is not solid. Its interior contains a vertiginous, undulating pink swirl of cloud-like forms that seem to descend into infinity. This work, like many of her pieces, reacts to the environment. It’s constantly changing.

For more than a century, African art has challenged the western imagination. How and why does an embroidered apron, for example, made in the 1970s by an unidentified, young South African woman, merit a place in a world-class museum? The answer may be found in “Object, Image, Collector: African and Oceanic Art in Focus,” the fascinating exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, through July 18. The exhibition traces the evolution of African artifacts from object to art.



“The impact of photography in promoting this shift has been neglected,” says Curator Christraud Geary. Photographs– the “image” referred to in the show title – are a key to understanding how utilitarian objects came to be regarded as art.

Superpowers are a fact of history. Before the Soviet Union and The United States, the British Empire was the world superpower. The Brits assumed “the white man’s burden” and carried back to England treasures to fill its museums with booty from many lands, most famously Greece, Egypt, and the Mideast. Skimming the cultures of less powerful people is not looked upon kindly as recent headlines illustrate. Yet, objects in British museums often fare far better than those left in their native country, especially in war torn areas of the globe. The National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad was one of the first casualties of the war.

Art preserves - youth never fades and flowers never wilt - so even though the calendar tells us it’s October, it’s still summer at the Museum of Fine Arts where “Imperishable Beauty: Art Nouveau Jewelry” is on view through November 9. Bejeweled butterflies, exotic enameled dragonflies, fantastical flora, and beautiful women who first saw the light of day a century or more ago glow with perpetual life.

If you’re going to visit only one museum this summer, make it the Institute of Contemporary Art, and make it soon. The Anish Kapoor exhibition closes September 7. “Past, Present, and Future” is the first museum survey in the United States of the London-based artist’s sculpture in more than 15 years, and many of the works are on view here for the first time.