Photo courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Hopper, "Chop Suey" (1929). On view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Photo courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum

Sean Scully, "Untitled (Print #6)," from the portfolio "Enter Six" (1998). On view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

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1. Can’t get enough Edward Hopper? The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston may have just the comprehensive exhibition to satisfy your need for luminously desolate depictions of quotidian banality. Sate yourself with more than 90 works through August 19.

2. Speaking of discontent, few photographers better capture this mood than Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Active since the 1970s, diCorcia works in a documentary-like mode that is actually a hyper-real, often fictional take on everyday situations—his family at home, for instance, and hustlers on the street. Take a walk on the wild side until September 3, at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

3. The Peabody Essex Museum delves even deeper into the surreal with "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination." This self-taught artist, who died in 1972, pioneered the assemblage: three-dimensional collages and box sculptures of found objects. Assemblages, films, and prints—many never seen publicly—highlight this largest-ever retrospective of his work, through August 19.

4. You’ll also find odd juxtapositions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Stefano Arienti, a former artist-in-residence at the museum, has returned home, so to speak, to rummage through its Asian collection and archives—arranging items and adding some of his own, to create the installation An Asian Shore. Disembark there until October 8.

5. Art is largely about the viewer’s response, but is it possible to see yourself seeing? "Spencer Finch: What Time Is It on the Sun?" poses exactly this conundrum with sculptural installations and a 30-foot drawing at Mass MoCA. The show stretches until spring 2008.

Washington, D.C.

6. In the aftermath of World War I, growing social tension and unease roused artists to break free of traditional, realist forms of expression from the past. Through July 29, "Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939" investigates the explosion of new ideas that revolutionized art, architecture, and design and the complex social issues that provoked them, at the Corcoran Gallery.

7. In his paintings, internationally acclaimed Sean Scully conveys rich abstract relationships through trademark stripes, brick-like shapes, textures, and color themes. "The Prints of Sean Scully" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum presents a collection of 50 prints ranging from powerful, monumental projects to intimately expressive, modest-size works, through October 8.

8. Starting with an ivory figure and a copper alloy mask from the Benin kingdom, Paul and Ruth Tishman began one of the most well-known collections of African art in the 20th century. "The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection," at the National Museum of African Art, through September 7, features their holdings of painted sculptures, shrines, large-scale pieces, and more.

9. Baroque artist Claude Lorrain drew his inspiration from Italy's beautiful scenery and rich history in its classical ruins. With more than 100 of his works, "The Painter as Draftsman: Drawings from the British Museum" features his finest drawings and the etchings, drafts, and sketches behind some of the greatest landscape paintings of the 17th century, at the National Gallery of Art, through August 12.

10. As part of a citywide celebration of art, the Phillips Collection presents "Lyrical Color: Morris Louis, Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland and the Washington Color School," an exhibition that highlights this school's revolutionary technique of applying paint to canvas, which emphasizes the optical effects of color and the flatness of the picture plane, through July 29.

This article was originally published in the summer 2007 issue of Museums New York magazine.