"Two of the most thrilling shows you are likely to see this year, both devoted to Native American art, are showing concurrently in New England. Both are filled with astounding and beautiful things. Both have been mounted at institutions that, boasting long relationships with Native American art, have collected it in depth. Both are underpinned by the expertise and personal voices of Native Americans. And both will take your imagination to places it may never have expected to go.

The first, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, is called “Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art,’’ and will run until April 29. The second, at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., opened last year and runs until March 11.

My best advice is: Make a weekend of them while they are both still on. For five more weeks, New Englanders have an unprecedented opportunity to see hundreds of amazing objects, from large-scale installations made in the past few years by brilliant artists who happen to be Native American, to traditional objects of bewitching beauty and palpable spiritual presence (totem poles, blankets, painted ceramics, woven baskets, bandolier bags, and so on) as well as numberless things, neither traditional nor contemporary, whose existence you might never have guessed at."

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Two museums show Native American art, then and now (The Boston Globe 2/3)