E-Mail This Article to a Friend Feeling all right ‘Getting Emotional’ at the ICA, Jodie Manasevit in Worcester, and Alex MacLean at the Peabody Essex BY RANDI HOPKINS

New England is hardly known for excessive displays of personal emotion — the stiff upper lip, the buttoned-down shirt, and the good-fences-make-good-neighbors approach to relationships is more like it. But sharing our feelings is the order of the day in "Getting Emotional," a group exhibition with 33 international artists that opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art on May 18. The irony is not lost on exhibition curator Nicholas Baume, who admits in the catalogue essay that a friend from Los Angeles laughed out loud and said, "You’re doing that show in New England?", when he told her what he was working on. "I took her point," he continues, "but it also made me conscious of the fact that I too have often been described as ‘reserved.’ Does this reserve, I wondered, mean that my experience of emotion is any less profound or compelling than it is to somebody less reserved?" Baume’s self-consciousness and self-doubt are, I think, little keys to this exhibition, which explores how artists can depict human emotion without becoming trite or sentimental, pitfalls that serious art has been making a major effort to avoid for at least the past 40 years.

"Getting Emotional" looks at recent art that takes some aspect of emotion itself as its subject matter. British artist Sam Taylor Wood’s "Crying Men" is a series of photographic portraits of famous film actors — Laurence Fishburne, Ed Harris, Willem Dafoe — who’ve been asked to cry for the camera. Taylor Wood seems to question not only what it looks like to cry but also whether we can we tell when crying is real. What does real emotion look like? Her work opens a Pandora’s box of questions for art viewers in an image-soaked era.

The show also includes less mediated instances of emotion by the likes of Nan Goldin and Catherine Opie, who make their own intimate lives the subject of their photography, and Elizabeth Peyton and John Currin, who boldly go where artists didn’t used to dare, painting subjects who might be experiencing emotions, alone or together with friends or lovers.

It’s the one-on-one relationship of painter to paint, brush, and canvas that’s the subject of "Jodie Manasevit: Just Paintings," which opens at the Worcester Museum of Art on May 13. That doesn’t mean there are no emotions involved. Manasevit’s passion for her materials is reflected in a body of work that examines how the stroke of a paintbrush can be both the subject of a painting and its primary organizing principle. With "just" the elements of her medium — brush stroke, color, and space — she pulls you into the pure experience of looking.

Perspective is the thing for Alex MacLean, who has been flying his Cessna 182 over the US and photographing the landscape for more than 25 years. His viewpoint is so extreme and his eye is so keen that the results transcend documentation. "Air Lines: Photographs by Alex MacLean," which opens at the Peabody Essex Museum on May 14, presents a wide selection in which the lines and grids of human intervention in the land suggest playful, drawn marks and the textures of farm, suburb, and city work like brush strokes to create beautiful and evocative images.

"Getting Emotional" is at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston Street in Boston, May 18 through September 5; call (617) 266-5152. "Jodie Manasevit: Just Paintings" is at the Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury Street in Worcester, May 13 through August 21; call (508) 799-4406. "Air Lines: Photographs by Alex MacLean" is at the Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square in Salem, May 14 through January 22; call (866) 745-1876.