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FROM MUST-SEE DANCE PERFORMANCES TO AVANT-GARDE THEATER, THESE ARE THE EIGHT ESSENTIAL HAPPENINGS OF CHICAGO’S NEW CULTURAL SEASON.

These are the eight essential happenings of Chicago’s new cultural season.

Saying goodbye to summer is a whole lot easier when you consider all that’s coming in the new cultural season—like these eight absolute must-see and -do happenings for fall.

Art and architecture aficionados have a particularly sweet fall ahead of them. At the Renaissance Society, there’s the Jennifer Packer exhibition “Tenderheaded” (September 9 through November 5, 5811 S. Ellis Ave., 773-7028670; renaissancesociety.org), figurative paintings that toy with abstraction and read like fading frescoes, or the imprints of shadows. On a poppier front, graffiti and cartoons inform the freewheeling imagery of Chicago’s own Hebru Brantley, whose trademark goggled kids suggest a marriage of Speed Racer and Margaret Keane’s wide-eyed waifs of the 1960s, and who gets a solo show, “Hebru Brantley: Forced Field,” at the Elmhurst Art Museum (September 9 through November 26, 150 Cottage Hill Ave., Elmhurst, 630-834-0202; elmhurstart museum.org). “Make New History” is the theme of this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial (chicagoarchitecture biennial.org), which includes

EXPO Chicago’s sixth year features an impressive slate of global artists, including Rodrigo Oliveira (above: Condomínio, 2015) with Lisbon’s Galeria Filomena Soares and Dorian Gaudin with Berlin gallery Dittrich & Schlectriem (left: Good Fortune...