The Best of 2006: Art

Space is the theme for this year's top 10 list celebrating the local museum world, which was positively jumping with alterations, renovations, reopenings, repurposings and reimaginings of the physical environments in which we experience art and life.

1. The rebirth of the Old Patent Office Building as the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture was this summer's big news, with the "open storage" facility known as the Luce Foundation Center quickly becoming one of my favorite spots to while away an afternoon and the National Portrait Gallery's embrace of contemporary art one of the most welcome policy changes. On view through Feb. 19, the intense, magical box constructions of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination" lead visitors on a voyage to a kind of inner space.

2. "Hiroshi Sugimoto," at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, featured one long, dimly lighted, curving gallery showcasing 13 of the conceptual photographer's black-and-white seascapes. It was the first time I've seen the doughnut-shaped museum use its unique architecture in such a stunning way. With the Hirshhorn's recent addition of those photographs to its permanent collection, let's hope it won't be the last.

3. This fall, the Baltimore Museum of Art not only eliminated its admission fees -- hooray! -- but rededicated the first gallery of its West Wing for Contemporary Art as an experimental project space. Under the rubric "Front Room," the series of mini-shows that will take place there started off with a bang, with a dramatic kinetic sculpture by Washington artist Dan Steinhilber featuring mountains of foam packing peanuts agitated by industrial fans, leaf blowers and robotic vacuum cleaners. Through Feb. 18.

4. The National Gallery of Art's sprawling "Dada" retrospective was notable for the freshness of the early-20th-century art on display, including a walk-in construction evocative of the angular collaged environment christened "Merz" and built by artist Kurt Schwitters in his Hanover, Germany, home.

5. The Phillips Collection unveiled its latest expansion, the Sant Building , in April, featuring a couple of galleries that finally have ceilings tall enough to do justice to some of the big-shouldered postwar paintings in the museum's permanent collection. The handsome, 180-seat theater was sorely needed, too.

6. "Courbet and the Modern Landscape" may upset some traditionalists, seeing as the small show at Baltimore's Walters Art Museum (like the Baltimore Museum of Art, now free) features almost no wall text, ambient music and dramatic lighting schemes keyed to the four seasons. Still, it's a bold -- and mostly successful -- experiment in repackaging 19th-century landscape painting for the computer age. Through Jan. 7.

7. "The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture and Design" is all about space. Not just the roofs over our heads, though, but the world around us and its precious resources. One of the coolest features of the eye-opening show at the National Building Museum is a walk-in model of a Glidehouse, an energy-efficient, solar-powered modular home designed by architect Michelle Kaufmann. Through June 3.

8. Part of "Perspectives: Simryn Gill," the contemporary artist's "Forking Tongues" stops visitors in their tracks with its spiraling arrangement of dried red peppers and antique cutlery laid out on the floor of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery's entrance pavilion. It's an arresting visual, even if you don't get the artist's allusions to the commodification and consumption of native culture. Through April 29.

9. If you look closely, you can still make out faint traces of the colored vinyl tape that was stuck to the floor of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden's lobby for a few months this summer, transforming it into a walk-in piece of geometric art. "Directions: Jim Lambie" was supposed to be about, in the artist's words, "making edges disappear," but the one boundary it erased most powerfully is the one between fine art and interior design.

10. Just because Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's "The Paradise Institute" was on my top 10 list four years ago doesn't mean I can't hype it again, now that the Corcoran Gallery of Art has put the 13-minute, immersive sound-and-video show on view again. This go-round, you don't have much time to see it. It goes back into storage after Sunday.