The new gallery has an all-star cast of prints, drawings and other works from the museum’s permanent collection, including a delectable Edgar Degas pastel Dancer with a Bouquet.

RISD Museum of Art

Later this year, the RISD Museum will undergo its biggest expansion in more than two decades when the Rhode Island School of Design finally opens its new Chace Center complex on North Main Street. Designed by acclaimed Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, the center will feature a host of museum-related amenities, including a 6,000-square-foot gallery for changing exhibitions, a sleek new entrance and reception area and 200-seat auditorium.

The opening, which is slated for Saturday, Sept. 27, will also feature an installation by one of RISD’s most famous alumni: glassmaker Dale Chihuly.

With so much happening this fall, you might expect the museum’s menu of summer events and exhibits to be a little lighter than usual. Wrong.

Today, for example, museum officials are due to unveil a new suite of galleries devoted to, among other things, 20th-century art and design, photography, video art and European prints and drawings. The galleries, which are located on the third floor of the museum’s main Radeke Building, occupy an area that was formerly used for museum offices and storage.

The largest of the new spaces, known collectively as the South and Central Galleries, houses a revamped — and, as it turns out, extensively rethought — display of 20th-century prints, paintings, furniture and other artworks. Many museums, of course, revise their exhibits from time to time. And 20th-century art, which for many years was presented as a simple progression from Picasso to Pollock to Pop, has been more prone to revision than most.

Still, “Subject to Change: Art and Design of the Twentieth Century” goes farther than many such efforts. Though the display of some 130 objects from the museum’s permanent collection follows a rough chronology, beginning with Picasso and Matisse and continuing through Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual Art, it also takes some interesting detours into the worlds of fashion, architecture and industrial design. The result: a curatorial mash-up in which paintings and sculptures happily rub shoulders with chic cocktail dresses and mid-century modern furniture.

I’ll have more to say about the museum’s 20th-century galleries in a future column. But for now, let me just say that the installation looks terrific. That includes a striking series of platforms and display cases created by New York-based exhibit designers Sandra Wheeler and Alfred Zollinger. Their work is as sleek and stylish as any of the artworks on display.

A similarly eclectic spirit can be found the museum’s other new galleries.

Fans of more traditional art, for example, will want to head for the new Vincent and Linda Buonanno Works on Paper Gallery. Here, curator Emily J. Peters has assembled an all-star cast of prints, drawings and other works from the museum’s permanent collection. Among the highlights: a wonderful horse study by the 16th-century German artist Albrecht Durer, a chunky pre-Cubist nude by Picasso, a great Van Gogh landscape, View of Arles, and a pair of delectable Degas pastels: Dancer with a Bouquet from about 1880 and Before the Race from about 1885.

What’s the connection between these disparate works?

All were donated by two of the museum’s most generous patrons: Eliza Greene Radeke (1854-1931) and her niece, Helen Metcalf Danforth (1887-1984). In fact, as Peters argues in an essay written for the exhibit, Radeke and Danforth were among the first American collectors to purchase works by Picasso, Matisse and other European modernists. She also notes that many of the purchases were made with an eye toward educating RISD students — a point the show emphasizes by dividing the works according to genres such as figures, portraits and landscapes.

The Bill and Nancy Tsiaras Photography Gallery, meanwhile, is hosting an exhibit of works by current and former RISD faculty and alumni. If that sounds a bit incestuous, consider that two giants of the medium — Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan — taught at the School of Design and helped make its photography program one of the best in the country.

As you might expect, both men are well represented in “RISD and Photography” — Siskind by some of his iconic close-ups of gloves, posters and other everyday objects; Callahan by a mix of urban scenes, nature studies and a typically elegant nude study of his wife, Eleanor.

As for the show’s more recent works, look for Sally Gall’s haunting studies of long-rooted tropical trees, David T. Hanson’s harrowing shots of Western coal mines and Steven Smith’s laconic photographs of contemporary American suburban developments.

For more adventurous museum-goers, there’s Exine, a room-filling mural by the contemporary British artist Paul Morrison. Installed in the museum’s new education gallery (officially the Norman and Rosalie Fain Family Education Program Gallery), it features a dizzying array of botanical images — leaves, trees, flowers — all rendered in Morrison’s trademark black and white.

Exine (the word refers to the outer layer of a plant spore or pollen grain) is also typical of Morrison’s work in another way: it scrambles the usual relationships between large and small, near and far. (Morrison’s flowers, for example, are as big as buses.) The results are both exhilarating and disorienting — like stepping into an illustration for Alice in Wonderland.

“Subject to Change: Art and Design of the Twentieth Century,” “RISD and Photography,” and “From Durer to Van Gogh: Gifts from Eliza Metcalf Radeke and Helen Metcalf Danforth” open today at the RISD Museum, 224 Benefit St., Providence. Hours: Tues.-Sun. 10-5. Admission: adults $8, seniors $5, college students with I.D. $3, ages 5-18 $2. Contact: (401) 454-6500.

Visitors to Brian Chippendale’s one-man show at the Stairwell Gallery in Providence may also feel as if they’ve wandered into Wonderland, albeit a comic-book Wonderland populated by a weird array of mutant space aliens, killer ninjas and animal-headed humanoids. The show, which runs through Sunday, also boasts a giant papier-mâché toadstool — another Wonderland-ish touch that also represents one of Chippendale’s first forays into large-scale figurative sculpture.

Though small in size, the show manages to touch on nearly every aspect of Chippendale’s work. That includes the vibrant silkscreen prints and posters he began making at Fort Thunder, the legendary underground arts space that he helped found, and the playfully twisted collages he makes by cutting up and recycling bits of his own work (and which suggest a cross between Marvel comics and South Park). You can also purchase CD releases from several of Chippendale’s bands, of which the noise-rock duo Lightning Bolt (with bassist Brian Gibson) is probably the best known.

A closing party for show will be held tomorrow from 6 to 9 p.m.

Through Sunday at the Stairwell Gallery, 504 Broadway (next to Nick’s) in Providence. Hours: Thurs.-Sun. 11-4 and by appt. at (401) 965-4525.