Back To School month is great for art lovers

Sure, the Greater Boston area is known for world-class museums and art galleries. But it is also home to over 100 colleges and universities, many of which offer exceptional arts programming. September is, of course, when students return for classes and parents make their annual tourist pilgrimage to Boston where they fill in the gaps between loading a UHaul truck and unloading that truck with meaningful cultural excursions.

The Big Red & Shiny Listings feature a great sampling of what is on view for the newly-returned students and their families -- not to mention the rest of us!

At UMass Lowell you'll find an "exhibition of extended media photographs by Chehalis Hegner" titled "Re-Visioning in the Garden of Eden." Head over to The Photographic Resource Center at Boston University for two exhibitions on the theme of young womanhood: "Rania Matar: Girls in Between: Portraits of Identity" and "Nancy Grace Horton: Being 13" and The Davis Museum at Wellesley College offers up "A Generous Medium, Photography at Wellesley 1972-2012." At the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, you'll find exhibitions by internationally renowned artists, lectures, student film screenings and performances. In May 2013, Le Corbusier's only building in North America turns 50 years old, but celebrations have already begun. In fact, this Thursday September 13, 2012 is the opening reception for Circa 1963, an exhibition of iconic works from the early to mid-1960's.

A quick check of Google also shows that there are great exhibitions at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, The Art Institue of Boston at Lesley University, The New England School of Design at Suffolk University, Montserrat College of Art, MassArt and many more.

September is a great month for art in Boston. Make sure to hit up the colleges and universities and check out the diversity and intensity of work on view.

If you're looking to head out of the big city for a day or weekend, the colleges and universities surrounding the Greater Boston area are great destinations to take in some art. The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College is currently showing though December 31st Reinventing Tokyo: Japan's Largest City in the Artistic Imagination, The Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College are only a short drive away and offer a great permanent collection and exciting contemporary art exhibitions. Take in the New England fall foliage and head to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art which is currently showing William Wegman: Hello Nature through October 21st, 2012.

Art is all over us, so get out there and enjoy it. If you're on Twitter or Facebook, let us know which exhibitions caught your attention or which ones our readers should not miss.