Traveling the world (ancient and modern) at museums

In the radical restructuring director Malcolm Rogers has wrought at the Museum of Fine Arts, there is a fleck of poetic justice in changing the job - and title - of Theodore Stebbins Jr. from curator of American paintings to chair of the new Art of the Americas mega-department. Stebbins has spent 30 years working on Martin Johnson Heade, the peripatetic 19th-century American artist who made three trips to South and Central America, painting jungles, orchids, and hummingbirds. This exotica is included in the "Martin Johnson Heade" exhibition at the MFA Sept. 29-Jan. 16, organized by Stebbins, also the organizer of the very first Heade retrospective, at the MFA in 1969. In a museum world where marketing increasingly dictates programming, the prospect of a show born of decades of dedicated research, devoted to an artist who is not a name brand, is heartening.

Otherwise, Boston-area museums are offering a global array of art this fall, with work from China, Turkey, Egypt, and Ireland, among other places. One of the most important shows, though, is all-American. "To Conserve a Legacy: American Art From Historically Black Colleges and Universities" is at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover through Oct. 31. The ambitious project, organized by the Addison and the Studio Museum in Harlem, involves the conservation, documentation, and exhibition of more than 150 major works, as well as a conservation training program for minority students.

The McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College has a history of presenting Irish exhibitions both historical and contemporary. In the latter category is "Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political," at the museum Oct. 1-Dec. 12. The show is organized by the authority in the field, Declan McGonagle, founding director of Dublin's Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Harvard presents art from Ottoman Turkey and contemporary Germany this fall. "Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy From the Sakip Sabanci Museum" in Istanbul is at the university's Arthur M. Sackler Museum Oct. 9-Jan. 2. "Hanne Darboven: Works 1969/1972/1983," three decades' worth of the Hamburg-based artist's exploration of time and history, is at Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum through Nov. 7.

A clutch of area shows are devoted to figurative painting. "A Unique American Vision: The Paintings of Gregory Gillespie" is a major retrospective of a Western Massachusetts artist known for dense, complex iconography. The Gillespie show is at the MIT List Visual Arts Center Oct. 8-Dec. 19, as is Boston artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons's new installation, "Meanwhile, the Girls Are Playing."

Prior knowledge

Like Gillespie, Scott Prior is a Western Massachusetts figurative painter whose works are more than they seem on the surface. "Light on the Familiar: The Paintings of Scott Prior," the first comprehensive look at his work, is at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln Sept. 18-Nov. 28.

"The World as Mirror: Paintings by Jon Imber," at Boston University's 808 Gallery Oct. 22-Dec. 5, is a mid-career survey of a Boston expressionist whose subjects are the figure, landscape, and his own life.

"Andrew Stevovich: A Retrospective of Paintings, Drawings and Prints," at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham through Nov. 7, chronicles the career of yet another local figurative artist of note.

As for abstraction, the entire "Ninth Triennial," at the Fuller Museum of Art in Brockton through Jan. 2, is devoted to it. That's thanks to guest curator Carl Belz, director emeritus of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, a champion of abstract painting. Belz has selected 69 artists, primarily from the Boston area, all working in nonrepresentational modes.

Back at the Rose, the first fall offerings are "Alchemies of the Sixties," works by the stars of that vibrant era, Robert Rauschenberg to Ellsworth Kelly, drawn from the museum's own collections and those of supporters, and "Bruce Pearson: A New Visual Language," styrofoam reliefs that recall Op and Pop. Both are up through Oct. 17.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum continues its admirable practice of connecting its historic collections with contemporary work in "Threads of Dissent," which pairs tapestries old and new, the latter by artists including Leon Golub and Lilian Tyrrell. "Threads of Dissent" is at the Gardner Oct. 22-Jan. 30.

Photography - recently elevated to its own department at the MFA - has a strong presence in other area institutions this season. "Village Works: Photographs by Women in China's Yunnan Province," at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, from Tuesday through Jan. 9, is the first installment of the Davis's yearlong exploration of contemporary Chinese culture. The result of a Ford Foundation project that taught rural Chinese women of all ages to use automatic cameras to record a year's worth of their daily lives, the exhibition includes 75 images culled from over 25,000.

"Photography in Human Experience," at the Photographic Resource Center through April 28, draws on the immense archives of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities and includes historic photos from the 1860s to the 1920s, on the themes of family, media, technology, and the intangible, a tough subject for the most tangible of media to pin down. A contemporary take on the idea of family, "Fractured Mirrors, Broken Windows," organized by Deborah Bright, is at the PRC through Oct. 22.

Homes and mirrors

"Home: Photographs by Shellburne Thurber," at the Institute of Contemporary Art through Oct. 31, features the Boston artist's eerie photographs of abandoned houses in the American South. In the ICA's concurrent show, "Jim Hodges: every way," the artist transforms silk flowers and broken mirrors into poetic meditations on loss.

The Massachusetts College of Art exhibits "No Ordinary Land: Photographs by Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee" in its Bakalar Gallery through Oct. 16. Beahan and McPhee, both Mass. Art teachers, have lugged a 50-pound camera around the world for over a decade to collaborate on lush, large-format works.

Photographs from the family albums of Polish Jews, who gave them to friends during the Holocaust and did not survive to retrieve them, make up "And I Still See Their Faces," at Boston University's 808 Gallery through Oct. 6.

The fall lineup at the MFA includes the annual appearance of students and alumni of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in the Big House itself, in the "Traveling Scholars" show, up through Oct. 17. But the museum's biggest lure this season is "Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen," on view Nov. 14-Feb. 6. One of the most ambitious explorations of Egyptian art in decades, it includes, in addition to more than 250 works of art, a video walk-through of the lost city of Amarna.

Further afield, is Maxfield Parrish sentimental illustrator or something more profound? Decide for yourself when the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, N.H., presents "Maxfield Parrish, 1870-1966," Nov. 6-24. "Crafting the Medici: Patrons and Artisans in Florence, 1537-1737" is at the David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, this Saturdaythrough Oct. 24. "About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits" is at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Sept. 24-Jan. 30. And at a moment when museums are expanding as never before, the Wadsworth provides a valuable public service with a daylong Oct. 1 symposium on planning and building, called "Architecture and the New Museum: Visions of the Future."