Choi records signs, symbols, silhouettes and mysterious personal ideograms in clay slip, commenting on the intertwined roles of communication and expression in art.

When you pass the Starbucks at Broad and Pine streets, walk a few more feet toward City Hall to see the flight of time embodied in Lucartha Kohler's romantic vignette of fragile leaves of glass behind a pane of glass. Unfortunately, students squatting on the window ledge of the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery often block the view of Kohler's installation but they do contribute a complementary effluvium of burning leaves (alas, tobacco).

For a canny use of sheer luscious color in a grand scale, Elizabeth Osborne's paintings hold up beautifully after a quarter century.

Currently incarcerated in Graterford Penitentiary, Hernan Cortes, who used to write graffiti as "SPEL," now paints under the same name. SPEL may be cut off from society in some ways but his integration of abstraction, symbol, image, found materials and writing is quintessentially postmodern.

You may need a car to see the drawings of comic stripper Colley but the drive is worth it, even if they haunt your (not so restful) dreams. Lecture: David Sandlin, Oct. 19, 7 p.m.

Because of the work of Dick Torchia, the camera obscura, the oldest photographic device, has a well-developed postmodern history in Philadelphia. The Print Center's project of commissioned photographs by a trio of notable artists presents fascinating possibilities — from Lutter's camera in a parking garage to Morell's superimposition of the Philadelphia Museum of Art onto a de Chirico painting.

Pathways will lead visitors through a simulated forest environment in an installation by the 25-year-old collaborative team of landscape architect Laurie Olin and architect Peter Eisenman. Both men are prolific writers (Eisenman co-authored Chora L Works with Jacques Derrida) so, as in the title of the work, anticipate deep ambiguity.

The viceroyalties of "New Spain" included what's now know as Mexico, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Peru. The PMA's big fall show also includes the Portuguese colony of Brazil. Meticulous crafting and rich materials: gold, silver, mother-of-pearl, ivory and lacquer will encompass an amalgamation of pre-Colombian, Asian, African and European cultures in decorative, domestic, religious and fine arts. A feast.

PAFA offers a unique glimpse of the cream of a fine collection of American Modernist art assembled by Minnesota businessman Myron Kunin. Among some 80 works are examples by O'Keeffe, Dove, Hartley, Demuth, Sheeler, Davis, Tooker and Neel.

Once again working primarily as a painter and book artist, Viennese Actionist Günter Brus no longer treats his own body as a surface to be scratched and mutilated. Performances in 1965, 1968 and 1970 are documented through photography and video. One led to his being sentenced to six months in prison for degrading the symbols of the Austrian state.

Undoubtedly planned as a companion to "The Arts in Latin America," the PMA's exhibition of Mexican printmaking will explore an unusual and powerful Modern graphic sensibility. Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros and Tamayo shine along with less celebrated but equally effective artists.