''Baseball parks,'' says photographer Jim Dow, ''are the contemporary equivalent of cathedrals. They're the outgrowth of that medieval ideal. They show the aspirations and texture of their community.''
Dow, an architectural and fine-art photographer, has traveled the country for the past two decades, shooting baseball parks. His images, which recently ended a stint as a traveling exhibit sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, will be on view at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley College starting Saturday - just in time for Tuesday's All-Star Game at Fenway Park, only two blocks away.
The stadium photographs are panoramas, three or four frames joined together to create images both intimate and monumental. Look carefully at the picture of old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, torn down to make way for the state-of-the-art Camden Yards in 1992, and you'll see a tomato patch the Orioles' manager tended himself. At the same time, the amphitheater of the park unfolds with a democratic majesty, a place for the people.
Over the years, Dow has photographed dozens of minor league parks. Minor league teams have welcomed him; the majors, concerned about licensing issues, have restricted his access. He couldn't photograph games in the majors, but the drama not only of the players but the fans in the minor league stadiums adds poetry. An image of a rookie league game in Virginia shows only a few fans lolling in the stands. The players, in long-exposed shots, appear as a blur, but the flavor of a game played on a long summer evening as the sky turns pink is palpable.
The show also features detail shots: a popcorn machine; hand-painted signs along the outfield fence; the handsome architecture of a stadium entrance in Macon, Ga. These and the stadium images pay tribute to the essence of the game, baseball minus its marketing machinery. They bring the game back to its heart: the players who plug away, and the fans who never give up on them.
Jill Reynolds tackles the chicken-and-egg question in her installation at the Bunting Institute. Reynolds sees breath as a means of communication; she blows glass, and her breath creates shape and meaning. ''Nexus'' features a network of glass bubbles behind a leaded-glass window. Each contains a letter of the alphabet. The bubbles, connected by a network of rubber tubing, float in blue water. Another tube runs from the window to a water tank.
Yet another hooks the window to a diorama, where water flows into a glass udder and sprinkles down onto a menagerie of worshiping glass animals below.
Elements of creation echo through ''Nexus'': The window looks like a dividing cell; the letters are the nuclei of communication, the building blocks of understanding. Yet the big bang depicted in the window doesn't simply lead to the Eden in the diorama; the connection between the two circulates, with the water. They create and re-create each other. Creation cannot be separated from creator.
Another piece in the show, ''Body Alphabet,'' sets 26 slides on a light board. They depict body parts, and in the creases and curves of each we can make out the alphabet. ''K'' is described in veins on the sole of a foot; ''C'' is an ear; ''D'' is the depression between collarbone and shoulder. It's as if we can't help but make meaning, since the cells of language show themselves in our flesh. Even when we are determined to be mute, we communicate.
Ellen Gallagher, a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts who hit the big time a few years back, returns to her old stamping grounds for a show at the Mario Diacono Gallery. Gallagher's abstract paintings and drawings address issues of race, learning, and language.
In the past, she has painted the dotted lines of a child's penmanship paper and filled them with a lexicon of shapes drawn from minstrel shows, like exaggerated bright eyes and thick lips. The alphabet of images many of us censor from consciousness danced across the canvas like a spelling lesson.
Gallagher still has her penmanship paper. Here, it is painterly, smudged, and blue, painted in a narrow strip along the gallery wall. It's a pregnant painting: The blue feels ethereal, the smudges like nascent, unarticulated thoughts.
The largest painting in the small show is glossy black enamel. Shapes flit and unfurl both above and beneath the skin of the paint: slivers of paper like a pack of kindling, from which rise tiny disks like bubbles; loops and curlicues building into a wave of pattern along the bottom; the ever-present lips.
It's stunning. Gallagher demands we confront black, and all the cultural baggage of its darkness, whether that has to do with race, shadows, the night, or the unknown. Here, its glossy surface reflects light as well as absorbs it. Funny shapes, pretty patterns, and rough strips linger under the surface or scratch about on top of it. It's daunting, inviting, and mysterious - quite human.
