Conference

Making the System Work: Urban Violence and Legal Solutions. Featured speakers include the Rev. Jesse Jackson, president and founder, National Rainbow Coalition; the Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor, Abyssinian Baptist Church, New York; and the Hon. Glenda Hatchett Johnson, chief presiding judge, Fulton County Juvenile Court, Georgia. Preregistration is required. $55 for students. Call 628-1530 or 491-4401 for more information. Through Saturday, Apr. 22.

Exhibits

Fogg Art Museum. Through July. "Shades of Significance: Tonal Values in Abstract Art." From its perceived origins in Cubism, through its dominance of the post-war American art scene, to its current coexistence with other approaches to imagemaking.

Through summer 1995. "Selections from the Joseph H. Hazen Collection." This exhibition offers viewers a rare opportunity to view privately owned works by some of the great masters of the late 19th and early 29th centuries. Included are works by Braque, van Gogh, Kandinksky, Modigliani, Leger, Picasso, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

"France and the Portrait, 1799-1870." This installation of works from the permanent collections explores the changing conventions and practice of portraiture in France between the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte and the fall of the Second Empire.

Through September 1995. "Body Sights: A Symposium on Vision, the Body and Video Art" is offered in connection with "Between Cinema and a Hard Place." This exhibition features artist Gary Hill's video/sound sculpture installation consisting of twenty-three modified video monitors of various sizes, posing questions about the relationships of space and time.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. 280 The Fenway, Boston. 566-1401. Through June 4. "Dennis Miller Bunker and His Circle" features more than 30 works of Bunker and some of the most celebrated names in American painting in the late 19th century.

Museums of Cultural and Natural History. Ongoing. "Birthstones" Explores the cultural and natural history of birthstones, and how perceptions of these precious and semiprecious gems have been influenced by mythology and astronomy.

Peabody Museum. Ongoing. "Encounters with the Americas."

Ongoing. "Ju/wasi: Bushmen of the Kalahari."

Ongoing. "Worlds in Miniature, Worlds Apart: Dioramas, Models, and Mannequins in the Peabody Museum."

Ongoing. "The Hall of the Northern American Indian."

Ongoing. "Ware Collection of Glass Flowers."

Sackler Museum. Through Dec. 30. "American art at Harvard: Cultures and Contexts." The first major survey of Harvard University's art collections in over 20 years provides a critical examination of art and material culture drawn from Harvard's museums and libraries in the context of interdisciplinary studies and revisionist scholarship.