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)

Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling
Atlantic Theater Company
This will be a decidedly more mature affair than Adam Rapp’s current drug comedy, but the prolific playwright’s latest piece promises to culminate in similarly surreal circumstances when a wealthy Connecticut couple celebrates its son’s release from a high-end psychiatric hospital. (September 9-October 23)

STREB Rehearsals
SLAM
Elizabeth Streb’s troupe of trapeze artists, stuntmen and tumblers are working towards their huge December show at the Park Avenue Armory, and you’re invited to come watch their rehearsals at Williamsburg’s STREB Lab for Action Mechanics (SLAM) most weekdays throughout the fall for free! (September 13-November 30)

2011 DUMBO Dance Festival
John Ryan Theater
Conveniently scheduled for the same weekend as the DUMBO Arts Festival, the 11th edition of this massive three-day dance festival organized by local troupe White Wave Dance brings over 100 companies and choreographers from all over the city and the world to perform short pieces in eclectic repertory programs, all of which are free. (September 23-25)

Pinocchio
Company XIV
Was originally going to run from late September to late October, but has been postponed until spring 2012.

Asuncion
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater
In case The Social Network didn’t provide enough jokes about privileged college students to get you through school, the hot Off Broadway ticket of the season finds Jesse Eisenberg starring in his own play, a comedy about two over-educated liberals whose new roommate—the titular Filipina woman—seems to offer the perfect opportunity for them to prove their open-mindedness.(October 12-November 27)

Burning
The New Group
Last time we reviewed a Thomas Bradshaw play, 2009’s The Bereaved, we deemed him “a talented and original new voice,” a pull quote-ready assessment that seems destined to be fulfilled as he moves up to Off Broadway with this ambitious new diptych about a contemporary black painter preparing an exhibition in Germany and a homeless actor arriving in New York in the 1980s. (October 19-December 10)

The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer
BAM
There’s a lot to be excited about in this fall’s Next Wave Festival at BAM—Robert Wilson’s Threepenny Opera (October 4-8), epic Shackleton puppet docu-drama 69°S. (November 2-5)—but we just can’t resist the idea of John Malkovich as a soprano-strangling serial killer-turned-tell-all memoirist. (November 17-19)

New York Philharmonic
Avery Fisher Hall
We’re seriously upset that the orchestra canceled its free outdoor parks concerts this season. But, we begrudgingly admit, the pre-season programming they’ve planned instead does sound pretty great: a piece of Mahler to commemorate 9/11; an evening of Henry V with Christopher Plummer; and a performance of West Side Story alongside the film (orchestral karaoke?) (September 7-17)

Satyagraha
Metropolitan 
Opera House
The highlight of the Met’s last season was its premiere of John Adams’ Nixon in China, and we have a feeling that this encore engagement of Philip Glass’s opera could be the Nixon of the fall.(November 4-December 1)

Merce Cunningham: The Legacy Tour
BAM
In their third-to-last performance ever—before a short visit to Paris and their New Year’s Eve finale at the Park Avenue Armory—the late choreographer’s company brings its Legacy Tour to Brooklyn with a three-part program including pieces from the 60s through the aughts, and featuring music by John Cage, Brian Eno and Sigur Rós, and set and costume designs by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. (December 7-10)