Best art gallery

If the Institute of Contemporary Art is winning Phoenix readers' best-gallery pick now, we can't imagine what'll happen in 2005, when the ICA moves into its in-the-works building on the waterfront at Fan Pier. The new digs, which will be the first major cultural institution built in Boston in nearly 100 years, will have triple the exhibition space as the current Boylston Street gallery, a performing-arts theater, a media-and-technology center, a bookstore, and a restaurant. What's not going to change is the ICA's innovative and provocative programs and exhibitions. The ICA has been bringing the likes of Picasso, Sherman, Warhol, and Rauschenberg, plus the best and brightest up-and-comers, to Boston since 1936, and you can bet there's more to come. With exhibitions like the current "Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art," the ICA proves that it's on the pulse of the very-latest and the what's-to-come.

Across the river in Inman Square, that spunky bastion of eclectic shops and great restaurants, the Zeitgeist Gallery, again lodges itself as a Phoenix-reader favorite. The Zeitgeist has a rogue and rebel flare for the unexpected, a devotion to all that runs against the current, and it provides a home to Boston's avant-garde, anarchist, improvisational, defiant, disorientating, disconcerting, and ever-experimental artists, musicians, and performers. The gallery offers figure-drawing classes, almost nightly concerts and performances, and rotating exhibitions. The Zeitgeist remains a vanguard of anti-establishment art in all forms.

Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston Street, Boston, (617) 266-5152; Zeitgeist Gallery, 1353 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, (617) 876-6060.