Sanford Biggers
SculptureCenter and Brooklyn Museum
It’s a busy fall for the L.A.-born, New York-based sculptor, performance and video artist, with the 13-piece mini-retrospective Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk–An Introspective at the Brooklyn Museum and the large-scale installation of new work Cosmic Voodoo Circus at SculptureCenter. His postmodern explorations of racial identity evade fixity and are often eerily funny. (September 10-November 28, September 23-January 8, respectively)

September 11
MoMA PS1
Many local museums will be opening 9/11 exhibitions on the tenth anniversary of the attacks (the International Center of Photography and City Museum of New York, for instance), but none so thoughtful or disaster porn-free as PS1 curator Peter Eleey’s star-studded conceptual exploration of the ways in which those events and their repercussions have transformed our ways of seeing and thinking. (September 11-January 9)

De Kooning: A Retrospective
MoMA
This will be the fall’s biggest exhibition, both in terms of square footage—it will take up The Modern’s entire sixth floor—and, we predict, attendance-wise. Because there will be something for everyone in this sweeping survey of the Dutch-born, New York-based expressionist, from canonical paintings to rarely seen prints, sculptures and a 1946 theatrical backdrop. (September 18-January 9)

Bob Dylan: The Asia Series
Gagosian Gallery
Yes, you read that correctly: the most powerful gallery in the world will open its fall season with a show of Bob Dylan’s latest travelogue-like impressionist acrylic compositions (this series focusing on journeys in Asia) at its Madison Avenue location. (September 20-October 22)

Lisa Yuskavage
David Zwirner Gallery
“Natural landscape as feminine physiognomy” is a familiar metaphor, but nobody literalizes it quite like Yuskavage, whose surreal oil paintings are inhabited by her trademark child-like nude giants, sexualized yet innocent, playful but somehow monstrous. (September 27-November 5)

Real/Surreal

Whitney Museum
While on one level fundamentally opposed, realism and surrealism remain inextricably linked; for proof of this just put an urban scene by George Tooker alongside one by Edward Hopper, as curator Carter Foster does here, and you’ll see that American developments in these two genres during the 30s and 40s went hand in hand. (October 6-February 12)

Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe
Metropolitan Museum
Pioneering photographer Alfred Stieglitz also ran a string of galleries in New York during the first half of the 20th century that showed leaders of the period’s American and European avant-gardes. Accordingly, he amassed an impressive collection that the Met acquired in 1949—including Picassos, Kandinskys, Brancusis, and of course O’Keeffes—but has never made the focus of an exhibition, until now. (October 13-January 2)

Carsten Höller: Experience

New Museum
While the Belgian conceptual artist won’t be installing one of his much-loved slides in the NuMu, this first New York survey of his work will include other perception-altering pieces like the impossibly slow “Mirror Carousel” ride, a sensory-deprivation pool, and the massive “Light Room” installation that creates the impression that the room is spinning. Expect to sign a waver upon entering. (October 26-January 15)

Maurizio Cattelan: All
Guggenheim
The Italian hyperrealist’s first major survey will fill the Gugg’s rotunda with more than 130 of his cartoonishly absurd yet arrestingly lifelike sculptures and installations from the 80s onward. As a centerpiece, Cattelan will create a new site-specific piece drawing on his entire oeuvre to date. (November 4-January 22)

Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture
Brooklyn Museum
This show caused quite a stir when, shortly after it opened at D.C.’s National Portrait Gallery last fall, the late David Wojnarowicz’s short film “A Fire in My Belly” was removed at the request of congressmen under pressure from a right-wing Catholic group. His film will be included in the show’s Brooklyn presentation, along with a stunning range of portraits portraying sexual difference in more or less overt terms by Alice Neel, Berenice Abbott, Jess Collins, Jasper Johns, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring and many more. (November 18-February 12)