NEW YORK, NY.- In the depths of summer, while other art lovers in New York are catching the B train to Brighton Beach or busy with parties in the Hamptons, I like to enjoy a week or two of lake weather in Cleveland, where my in-laws live, where the ice cream is fabulous — and where there’s no shortage of art to see. In years past I’ve visited Praxis Fiber Workshop and the Sculpture Center — both of which make ingenious use of the huge spaces that a postindustrial city can offer — as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. But these are the places that caught me this time.

Cleveland Museum of Art

Imagine the Metropolitan Museum with free admission and not more than a comfortable sprinkling of other visitors, and you’ll get a sense of the CMA. With an encyclopedic collection of more than 65,000 objects housed in a snazzy neo-classical palace, it’s always a great place to pass a few leisurely hours. But the Cleveland Museum of Art also hosts a constant stream of excellent temporary exhibitions. At the moment, it has shows on Korean couture and the history of Korea’s so-called Seven Jeweled Mountain; an installation by Rose B. Simpson; and a fascinating show of photos from East Los Angeles and the U.S.-Mexico border.

The real knockout, though, is “Fairy Tales and Fables: Illustration and Storytelling in Art.” In just two modest rooms and a hallway, it covers a thrilling range of artistic styles and tones, with prints and drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, Gustave Doré, Marc Chagall and dozens of others. Pablo Picasso’s exhilarating illustrations of “Lysistrata,” the mind-bending details of Eugen Napoleon Neureuther’s Sleeping Beauty prints, and Édouard Manet’s inky, self-conscious raven, made for Mallarmé’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem, could all anchor exhibitions in their own right. But I was most struck by four wood engravings that Clare Leighton made to illustrate Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.” I’ve never seen such depth and density wrung out of black and white, such virtuosic delicacy of engraving.

Museum of American Porcelain Art

A few years ago, Richard A. Barone, a retired asset manager, found himself reminiscing about the porcelain collectibles he’d once dabbled in trading, pieces made in a complex, uniquely American process in five factories in New Jersey. Shocked to discover that the factories were all closed or closing, and that there was no museum dedicated to American porcelain, he became a serious collector — buying up the remnants and archives of Edward Marshall Boehm Studio and the Cybis Studio in Trenton, along with hundreds of pieces — and opened his own.

Housed in the homey but extensive 1928 Telling Mansion, which spent most of its life as part of the Cuyahoga County Public Library, the 5-year-old Museum of American Porcelain Art still feels a bit like a labor of love. (It could use, for example, more explanatory labels.) But its collection is unparalleled, and once you’ve watched a brief film explaining the stages of production — the sculpting, the casting, the 13% shrinkage in the kiln, the delicate assembly, the painting, the refiring — you’ll find that every delicate, gaudy, labor-intensive new flower arrangement or tropical bird blows your mind. Note that while it is formally open only on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the museum is eager to accommodate visitors at other times by appointment.

Wade Memorial Chapel

Built in 1901 in memory of Jeptha Wade, founder of Western Union, by his grandson, the Wade Memorial Chapel in beautiful Lake View Cemetery balances extravagant materials, details and colors against the almost supernatural precision of their arrangement — it pretty much merits its own special pilgrimage. The centerpiece of the building, whose overall design was done mostly by Clara Driscoll, is “The Flight of Souls,” an astonishing, color-filled iridescent window depicting the Resurrection of Christ that the grandson, Jeptha Wade II, spotted in Louis Comfort Tiffany’s New York studio. The window was on its way to Paris for the Exposition of 1900, where it won a gold medal; Wade bought it when it got back.

But that centerpiece isn’t all.

Leading from the 2-ton bronze doors at the front of the building to the 400-pound alabaster lamps at the back are a pair of 32-foot-long allegorical mosaics of Old Testament holidays and Christian virtues rendered, in a nautical theme, with thousands of golden tesserae. If you gave them the attention they deserved, you’d be there all day. But don’t miss the nacre “oarlocks” on the cedar-of-Lebanon pews, and do your best to catch one of the daily tours. The guide just might demonstrate how the glass lilies and poppies at Christ’s feet change color under a spotlight.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.