17 Must-See Fall Art Exhibitions

As the seasons turn cooler, October ushers in a whole new lineup of exhibitions to keep art lovers on their toes this fall. Tomorrow, Chris Burden's work takes over the New Museum (both inside and outside), and just before Christmas, the theater/opera performance "The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic" comes to the Park Avenue Armory. Outside of New York, Mr. is set to exhibit at Galerie Perrotin in Hong Kong, and Jenny Holzer will show her first works in Chinese, also in Hong Kong. From old favorites like René Magritte to new blood like Ragnar Kjartansson, our list of 17 Must-See Fall Art Exhibitions are all the shows you want to see this season.

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Location: Park Avenue Armory, New York
Dates: Dec. 12 - Dec. 22

Director Robert Wilson takes on the life of the artist of the year, Marina Abramovic, with a performance that incorporates opera, theater, and visual art. The work reimagines Abramovic's life from her childhood in Yugoslavia to her growth as an artist of international acclaim. Queen Marina will play herself along with Willem Dafoe and singer Antony in this "quasi opera."

Location: Guggenheim Museum, New York
Dates: Oct. 25, 2013 - Jan. 22, 2014

Christopher Wool's monochromatic paintings pose the question of "how a picture can be conceived, realized, and experienced today," according to the Guggenheim's website. Wools' first retrospective will be staged in Frank Lloyd Wright's rotunda, as well as an adjacent gallery, and will include paintings, photos, and works on paper.

Location: Hirshhorn Museum, D.C.
Dates: Oct. 24, 2013 - May 26, 2014

From Yoshitomo Nara, to Ed Ruscha, to Jeff Wall, "Damage Control" tackles the theme of destruction in contemporary art. Involving every medium and pulling works from artists from all over the globe, this exhibition unites a seemingly insurmountable range of art under the umbrella of "damage." Dating as far back as 1950, the show builds on the wake of destruction left by WWII.

Location: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Dates: Sept. 28, 2013 - Jan. 12, 2014

This is the first major museum retrospective on Surrealist royalty René Magritte. The exhibition takes us into Magritte's dreamlike world whose images of apple-faced men and lovers with cloth over their faces have left imprints on our cultural consciousness since the turn of the century. MoMA's show will include 80 paintings, collages, and drawings by the artist.

Location: The First Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, Tenn.
Dates: Oct. 11, 2013 - Jan. 12, 2014

If you were looking for a reason to go to Nashville, this is it. Exhibiting 70 works from 30 black artists, this show is a survey of the most iconic African American art from the last 30 years. With a lineup that includes Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, Glenn Ligon, and Nick Cave, this show is bound to be a powerful examination of race, culture, and identity. "As the show evolved, we decided to call it 30 Americans. 'Americans,' rather than 'African Americans' or 'Black Americans,' because nationality is a statement of fact, while racial identity is a question each artist answers in his or her own way, or not at all," collectors Don and Mera Rubell explain in a museum statement.

Location: Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami
Dates: Dec. 4, 2013 - March 9, 2014

Young British Artist Tracey Emin has played with neon writing since the '90s, yet MOCA North Miami is giving the artist her first show focused wholly on her glowing text. The show, which is also Emin's first museum exhibition and the museum's kickoff to Art Basel Miami, will explore how her neon works change in meaning, from unapologetic confessions to cryptic messages.

Location: Galerie Perrotin, New York
Dates: Nov. 2, 2013 - Jan. 4, 2013

Galerie Perrotin just opened their first New York location last month, and one of the first artists on deck is the man of the moment, KAWS, who will be exhibiting new paintings. The Brooklyn-based artist, whose work is rooted in subway graffiti, has evolved to create fine art, toys, sculptures, a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade blimp, and this year's stage and Moonman for the MTV VMAs. Needless to say, the man his been pretty busy this year. Besides his show at Perrotin, KAWS will also exhibit at the Pennsylvania Museum of Fine Arts in a show called "KAWS @ PAFA," inserting his works next to PAFA's traditional collection.

Location: Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong
Dates: Oct. 4, 2013 - Nov. 9, 2013

Former assistant to Takashi Murakami, contemporary Japanese artist Mr. has grown into a full-blown talent in his own right. His works are grounded in Japanese pop, pulling from images of Anime and Manga as well as graffiti, doodles, and Photoshop. In Hong Kong, Mr. will exhibit canvases featuring stylized young girls from Japanese cartoons and video games.

Location: Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong
Dates: Sept. 19, 2013 - Nov. 2, 2013

Jenny Holzer has been making statements with text-based light projections and LED signs since the '80s. Her first show in Hong Kong, however, will be entirely new. For the first time ever, the artist will be working with Chinese characters, translating texts from her early works, Truisms, Living, and Survival, for a Hong Kong audience. The LED works will take the shapes of signs and stone benches.

Location: Zach Feuer Gallery, New York
Dates: Sept. 12, 2013 - Oct. 26, 2013

Canadian contemporary artist Jon Rafman is known for using Google Street View to create surreal and often nightmarish works. For his first solo show in New York, the artist plays with memory, using sculptures, video, and mixed media to explore our relationship to history and the past. Rafman uses "ruins," debris from contemporary culture, to comment on what we leave behind. According to the press release, "In Rafman's version of archaeology, a large finely engraved stone carving commemorates not fallen war heroes but the names of defunct New York state shopping malls." The artist asks us what we remember when we find broken objects from the recent past.

Location: Galería Javier Lopez, Madrid
Dates: Sept. 20, 2013 - Nov. 29, 2013

For his second show in the Spanish gallery, Todd James will exhibit works from across his whole of his career, including early graffiti pieces from the '90s and later Technicolor canvases of brightly-hued pirates. The show will also include an installation that first appeared in MOCA's "Art in the Streets" show called Vandal's Bedroom, a space filled with graffiti that references the artists' early work and lasting influences.

Location: White Walls Gallery, San Francisco
Dates: Sept. 14, 2013 - Oct. 5, 2013

Augustine Kofie's paintings look like pale Futurist works, colliding forms in space. His canvases are almost architectural, so the title of his third solo show at White Walls, "Structurally Sound," feels appropriate. For this exhibition, Kofie will exhibit recent works as well as notes and doodles from his studio, revealing the artists' process and the foundations of his dynamic and geometric paintings.

Location: Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York
Dates: Sept. 14 2013 - Oct. 26, 2013

"You don't simply take a look at new work by the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard; you plunge into his scabrous, unruly universe and hope for the best," writes Diane Solway in her review of Melgaard's first solo show with Gavin Brown in W Magazine. "Ignorant Transparencies" is a candy-colored nightmare, including giant painted Pink Panther sculptures and an incredibly intricate dollhouse. The darkly humorous show plays on pop culture, excess, and indulgence, and you just dive in head first and and enjoy it.

Location: HangarBicocca, Milan
Dates: Sept. 19, 2013 - Nov. 17, 2013

Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson descends on Milan with a video installation across nine projectors. In his films, which were shot in Upstate New York, Kjartansson's friends play different instruments and sing the song Feminine Ways. The immersive installation is meant to address the relationship between performance, poetry, concerts, and cinema, and the cyclical nature of all of these disciplines. The videos seem like windows into the activities of a backcountry cult, something similar to the one in Marcy Martha May Marlene, which just makes us more curious.

Location: Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London
Dates: Sept. 28, 2013 - Nov. 10, 2013

The first exhibition in Zaha Hadid's new Serpentine Sackler Gallery, this show is in danger of being overshadowed by the mountainous, sweeping white curves of Hadid's construction. It's a good thing, then, that Argentinian-born artist Adrián Villar Rojas has installed mammoth brick and clay sculptures that are impossible to ignore in the brand new space. For the inaugural exhibition, Rojas has placed large-scale solid forms in the gallery, including a life-sized elephant. Some of his sculptures look like artifacts or ruins laid out on shelves of a museum or archive. The installation plays with conceptions of time, history, and anthropology.

Location: Lazarides Rathbone, London
Dates: Oct. 11, 2013 - Nov. 14, 2013

French street artist JR has been busy travelling the world for his "Inside Out" project, but this fall he is finally returning to London after five years for a two-part solo show at Lazarides Rathbone called "Actions." For the show, JR will exhibit images from his projects spanning the globe, including everything from his 2005 project "Portrait of a Generation" in North Korea to his "Wrinkles" series in Berlin this year. The exhibition will also be a stop on the "Inside Out" tour, where Londoners will get a chance to paste their faces across the city using JR's travelling photo truck.

Location: New Museum, New York
Dates: Oct. 2, 2013 - Jan. 12, 2014

In the 1970s, Chris Burden's cringe-worthy performance pieces consisted of getting shot in the arm and getting his hands nailed to the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle. Someone that dedicated to his work definitely deserves a big museum show like the one that opened at the New Museum today. For the show, the artist's first New York survey, Burden's work literally takes over the museum. Hanging from the building's exterior hangs Burden's 30-foot high remote-controlled ship while his two Quasi Legal Skyscrapers sit on the museum's roof. The survey, which covers all five floors of the New Museum, takes us through a journey of physical and mental duress from Burden's works that deal with bodily endurance to his sculptures that play with machines and models.