Getting to know you ‘The Kingdom of Siam’ in Salem, ‘Girls on Film’ at Harvard, and ‘Big’ stuff in Somerville BY RANDI HOPKINS

This summer, Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum, which boasts world-quality collections of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Korean art, makes a major contribution to our knowledge of Asian art, religious practices, and daily life of one of the largest and most sophisticated kingdoms in Southeast Asia. Ayutthaya, or "Siam," as it was known in the West, is the focus of "The Kingdom of Siam: The Art of Central Thailand, 1350–1800," which opens on July 16.

Established in 1351, Ayutthaya flourished for more than 400 years as a major trading center with diplomatic ties to China, Japan, Persia, and, from the 17th century on, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. This prosperous and cosmopolitan kingdom was destroyed by an invasion from neighboring Myanmar (the former Burma) in 1767, and many Ayutthaya artifacts were lost, but "The Kingdom of Siam" — the first exhibition of classical art from Thailand in the US in more than 30 years — presents 89 of the finest survivors, with works culled from a cache of Buddha images, votive tablets, ritual objects, and royal jewelry that was found in the sacred deposit chamber of Wat Ratchaburana, an Ayutthaya temple that thieves stumbled on in 1957.

Like shining the high beam of museum attention into a dark corner of the cultural landscape, artists and film archivists Julie Buck and Karin Segal have dug through the film industry’s discards to create the intriguing "Girls on Film," which opens at Harvard’s Sert Gallery on July 16. The original film frames used to produce the images in this exhibition were known as "color-timing test strips" — short pieces of film featuring anonymous female film-studio workers that were spliced at the beginning or the end of a reel to enable technicians processing the film to achieve an even color balance or black-and-white density from one reel to the next. These women were never meant to be seen by the moviegoing public, yet it turns out that for film projectionists, the strips have long been a private source of pin-up girls. Buck and Segal retrieved discarded film leaders and enlarged, restored, and edited the images so that they now resemble glamorous publicity stills. The result not only rescues these hardworking women from silver-screen obscurity, it shows how the conventions of representing women on film apply no matter what.

Two events in Somerville loom LARGE: At the Brickbottom Gallery starting July 14, artists address the question "What Is Big?" in an exhibition of sizable work that challenges the idea of scale by 15 artists including Cyn Maurice, Chris Mesarch, and Alyson Schultz. And in Davis Square on July 16, ArtBeat 2005, Somerville’s annual multimedia street party, fills the outdoors from 11 am till 6 pm with music, dance, theater, food, performance, and local crafts and art.

"The Kingdom of Siam: The Art of Central Thailand, 1350-1800" | Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square, Salem | July 16–October 16 | 866.745.1876 | www.pem.org |"Girls on Film" | Harvard University’s Sert Gallery, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge | July 16–September 18 | 617. 495.9400 | www.artmuseums.harvard.edu | "What Is Big?" | Brickbottom Gallery, 1 Fitchburg Street, Somerville | July 14–August 20 | 617.776.3410 | www.brickbottomartists.com | "ArtBeat 2005" | Davis Square, Somerville | July 16 [rain date July 17], 11 am–6 pm | 617.625.6600 x 2985 | www.somervilleartscouncil.org