E-Mail This Article to a Friend A hard reign Ghada Amer at Wellesley, Ralph Lauren’s cars at the MFA, Ann Steuernagel at Radcliffe, and mandalas and mapping in Lawrence BY RANDI HOPKINS

The lobby at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College has become a very happening place over the past year, a laboratory for site-specific contemporary art by internationally celebrated artists, and one where students and visitors can watch the process unfold. It’s not the perfect space for art viewing — installations here must co-exist with furniture, windows, and busy foot traffic — but artists love a challenge, and this month, Ghada Amer gives it a go in "The Reign of Terror," which opens on March 9. Born in Cairo, Amer studied art in France and in Boston; she now lives in New York. She’s known for the political and cultural points she makes using fabric and thread, and also for her way with words — as when she embroidered chapters from the Koran dealing with women onto colorful hanging satin garment bags.

For "The Reign of Terror," Amer swathes the Davis lobby in vivid pink and green wallpaper she designed incorporating dictionary descriptions of the words "terror" and "terrorism" found in 18th-through-21st-century American, English, French, and Arabic dictionaries. The visually upbeat addition to the lobby’s décor stands in unsettling contradiction to the painful content of the text. The installation also includes paper plates, cups, and placemats designed by the artist as she takes these definitions out of the books and into our everyday lives.

Fashion designer Ralph Lauren has lent 16 beautiful cars from his personal collection to the Museum of Fine Arts for us all to admire in "Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection," which opens on March 6. Likened in the MFA’s press material to "the works of brilliant sculptors," the cars on view will include a 1938 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic Coupe and a sporty Porsche 550 Spyder, top-of-the-line models that reflect the innovative design, elegant form, and precision engineering lavished on these not-so-obscure objects of our desire.

Found film footage and some of the humbler (if perhaps stranger) stuff of life — including audio blips of Morse code and the song of rain-forest tree frogs — make up "Hush," a new installation by experimental-video and sound artist Ann Steuernagel that opens at Radcliffe’s Institute for Advanced Studies on March 2. Created during the artist’s recent stint as a fellow at the institute, "Hush" explores the relationship between sound and image, with a special interest in the everyday gestures and rhythms of her subjects, the little repetitions and idiosyncratic patterns that order our lives.

Order, and the way we seek to gain a handle on murky existential questions through pattern and design, is a driving principle behind two shows opening at the Essex Art Center on March 4. "Mandala: Seeking a Center" presents work by seven women who began working with these circular spiritual forms for meditative purposes after an illness — their own or a loved one’s. "Mapping Within" has artists from the Harvard Graduate School of Education exploring issues of identity in transition, something many of us might identify as a steady state.

"Ghada Amer: The Reign of Terror" is at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, 106 Central Street in Wellesley, March 9 through June 19; call (781) 283-2051. "Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection" is at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue in Boston, March 6 through July 3; call (617) 267-9300. Ann Steuernagel’s "Hush" is at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, 34 Concord Avenue in Cambridge, March 2 through 11; call (617) 495-8212. "Mandala: Seeking a Center" and "Mapping Within" are at the Essex Art Center, 56 Island Street in Lawrence, March 4 through April 1; call (978) 685-2343.