NEW YORK, NY.- Several of the art events I’m most psyched for in the season ahead aren’t neatly packaged and cataloged shows. They’re multi-venue extravaganzas, institutional self-celebrations or, in one case, the return of a monumental collection to view.

The Getty-sponsored Los Angeles project formerly known as Pacific Standard Time, made up of some 70 separate, more or less concurrent exhibitions, is a major season starter in early September. The two previous incarnations of the series, in 2011 and 2017, were both LA-centric in theme. The new one, “PST Art: Art & Science Collide” (Sept. 15-Feb. 16), is broader in scope, lifting off from Southern California into, among other places, outer space.

PST’s topics will include medieval European astrology, cosmological concepts in Mesoamerican art, and cyberpunk cinema. The Hammer Museum will present a keynote ecological show, “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice,” and at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory we’ll find “Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination,” which — according to the news materials — will embrace time travel, seismic percussion and an immersion in Martian winds, all of which, true, sounds very LA, which I love.

Chicago has a citywide project, too. Called “Panafrica Across Chicago,” it’s a season-spanning set of shows exploring the cultural and political concept of Pan-Africanism, which gained traction in the early 20th century. As a movement it promoted both the unity and the diversity of people of African descent across the globe, going back to ancient Egypt, forward into the Black Lives Matter present, and onward into the future. The centerpiece will be “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica” at the Art Institute of Chicago (Dec. 15-March 30), a show of some 350 objects touching on colonialism, self-assertion and varying definitions of Blackness itself, with satellite presentations at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, the University of Chicago and the Arts Club of Chicago.

Complementing the Chicago lineup will be “Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Nov. 17-Feb. 17), an exhibition demonstrating ways in which Black cultural figures engage and identify with ancient Egyptian images in art, literature and science. The show will cull historical pieces from the museum’s fabulous African, Asian and European collections, and stir in work by a pharaonically powerful gathering of contemporary art stars, including the late-and-beyond-great jazz musician Sun Ra and young Los Angeles artist Lauren Halsey, whose Afrofuturistic version of the Temple of Dendur beamed down to the Met Roof Garden last year.

Postpandemic foot-traffic figures are in for the Met, and overall they’re looking good. International visitors have been slow to return, but local and domestic out-of-town attendance is at or above pre-COVID-19 levels. And, in a novel development, the ethnic diversity of the crowds has significantly increased. The museum must be doing something right, and it is, with imaginatively themed shows and rethinkings of its permanent collection.

We’ll see a prodigious example of such a rethinking toward spring — May 31 — when the overhauled Michael C. Rockefeller Wing opens to the public, restoring the museum’s storied African, Oceania and art of the Americas collections to view, now spatially remapped and literally shown in new light.

Although we have to wait awhile for that Met reveal, the bicentennial festivities of the always adventurously shape-shifting Brooklyn Museum are just around the corner. The museum — which originated in 1824 as part of a village library — is celebrating its 200th anniversary Oct. 4 with a reinstallation of its renowned American art galleries, viewed through a Black feminist and Indigenous curatorial lens. What, exactly, this means remains to be seen, but any display that combines Hudson River School landscapes, Gwa’sala Kwakwaka’wakw’s potlatch figures, and a portrait (by fiber artist Bisa Butler) of the first Black female presidential candidate, Brooklyn’s own Shirley Chisholm, has my attention.

In the one-person-show category I have high hopes for museum surveys of two performer-choreographers. “Edges of Ailey” at the Whitney Museum (Sept. 25-Feb. 9) will feature drawings and dance notes by Alvin Ailey (1931-89), who had early ambitions to be a painter, and who encouraged the dancers he directed and mentored to spend time in museums. The show, which will also incorporate work by 80 artists inspired by him, points to sources for his choreography in the visual cultures of the American South, Brazil and West Africa and in the spiritual worlds of the Black church and Afro-Atlantic religions. And, most pertinently, there will be a gallery set aside for live performances by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

A little later in the fall, MoMA PS1 will host “Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon” (Nov. 14-2025), a 10-year survey of a genre-blending younger choreographer and visual artist whose career so far has encompassed painting, photography and sculpture, along with performance works, many of them collaborative. Among the highlights will be the first complete presentation of Lemon’s “1856 Cessna Road” (2002-24), a series of videos, made in partnership with a former Mississippi sharecropper named Walter Carter, that add up to a mesmerizing narrative, partly real-life, partly sci-fi, and unlike anything anyone else is doing.

I plan to head South for “Speaking Truth to Power: The Life of Bayard Rustin” at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, Tennessee, (March 15), a documentary tribute to an eloquent choreographer of the early civil rights movement. Letters, telegrams, calendars, phone books, letters and drawings, as well as art that Rustin collected — all displayed with photographs by David Katzenstein — will make up a visual biography of a show, which will have particular resonance in this history-haunted museum. (The complete archive of Rustin material will enter the museum’s permanent display in 2026.)

Unlike the season just passed, the new one won’t be biennial/triennial intensive, which doesn’t mean it will lack such new-talent roundups. Judging by its list of participants, “Flow States — La Trienal” at El Museo del Barrio (Oct. 10-Feb. 9) should be an expansive example. The emphasis will be less on places of origin than on movements among them, as embodied by the work of 33 artists who are largely from the United States, including Puerto Rico, but who bring influences from Asian, European and Indigenous sources wherever they go. Collectively, they break down conventional notions of belonging, and define migration as an opening into fresh cosmopolitan terrain.

Finally, in a new season dominated by exhibitions of new art I’m putting serious money for the top prize on “Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350” (Oct. 13-Jan. 26) at the Met, an overview of a short-circuited surge of painting that prefigured and shaped the Florentine Renaissance. A drumroll list of the Sienese artists — Duccio di Buoninsegna, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Simone Martini — hints at the wonders we’ll see. None of these artists survived the bubonic plague that devastated their city, but their art did, and sublime’s not a big enough word for it.

We used to see major shows of such early Western European religious work fairly regularly at the Met and elsewhere, though not anymore. Times change. Tastes change. Knowledge changes. I already know it will be one of my repeat go-to’s of the year.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.