Zoellner gallery educates and entertains

I like to visit Lehigh University's permanent-collection gallery when I'm tired of analyzing art for a living. It's my visual refuge, my intellectual spa.

Located on the lower level of the Zoellner Arts Center, the gallery is unusually inviting for a windowless basement room. The lighting is soothing. The floor is stimulating, a reflective river of highly polished, tightly banded maple rectangles. The 14-foot-high display cases, metal frames bolted at the corners to Plexiglas, are strikingly handsome. Placed in the middle of the floor, they offer roomy, rousing views of early editions of Walt Whitman's ''Leaves of Grass'' and African thumb pianos.

The nearly 140 objects, rotated every two or three years from Lehigh's repository of nearly 9,000 items, cover a hell of a lot of history, human and otherwise. Those thumb pianos border dazzlingly precise photographs of high-speed activities -- kicking a football, a bullet piercing an apple -- taken by Harold Edgerton, a pioneer of multiflash photography. A 5-foot-wide volume from John James Audubon's magisterial ''Birds of America'' folio is a crow's hop from a strangely beautiful serigraph of a bloody sanitary napkin made by Andres Serrano, who once created a furor by photographing a crucifix in a beaker of urine.

While the space is only 2,500 square feet, it's packed with sizable stories. Most galleries represent a handful of the eight leaders of the Ashcan School of gritty urban painters. The Zoellner has a wall of 20 works by every member of The Eight. Especially impressive are John Sloan's eight etchings of early 20th-century New York City, a panorama of horse-and-carriage aristocrats and tenement voyeurs.