Thomas Bayrle
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Opens November 29

Opening just before this year’s hypochondria-inducing edition of Art Basel Miami Beach is a retrospective of the great German multimedia artist. Bayrle has spent the better half of a century exposing the visceral and emotive effects of media and mass culture. If you dare make it to Miami, you’ll want to see Bayrle’s dizzyingly repetitive “super-forms,” plus a site-specific Madonna and child, before the museum moves into its new space in 2017.

 
Robert Rauschenberg
Tate Modern, London
Opens December 1

Hard to believe it’s been a decade since Paul Schimmel’s showcase of Rauschenberg’s Combines: the epochal, proto-Pop fusions of painting and collage from 1954–64, which integrated such unorthodox components as a shoe, a clock, and an angora goat. This show, by contrast, promises the full Rauschenberg, including the early white paintings and the lesser-loved late works, such as his garish ROCI series. Tours to New York and San Francisco next year.

 
Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Opens December 4

This two-hander is no artistic death match, though the friendly rivalry between the rule-breaking Spaniard and the Mexican muralist is certainly explored. Instead, the show looks at the surprising turn to antiquity both artists made between the 1920s and 1950s, and how myth figured into their conception of modernism. With 150 works, Picasso and Rivera are put in dialogue not just with each other, but with the ancient artifacts they venerated.

 
Runa Islam
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Opens December 10

Tucked into the museum’s top floor gallery this month is a small showing of two of the Bangladeshi-born Brit’s 16mm films, one of which is making its US debut. Created after her fellowship at the Smithsonian, these minimalist celluloid installations resist traditional narrative and display by focusing instead on the overlooked support structure and ungilded underside of artworks.

 
Lewis Baltz
Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid
Opens December 12

In the early 1970s, his rigorous, austere photographs of industrial parks around Irvine, California, systematized the American suburbs in a similar fashion to the Bechers’ factories and water towers. This exhibition showcases Baltz’s unromantic Americana, as well as the later and underappreciated color photography he produced after moving to Europe in the late 1980s.

 
Third Kochi-Muziris Biennale
Kochi, India
Opens December 12

In just four years this has become one of Asia’s most important biennials, and it draws on the complex maritime history of southern India as a blueprint for cross-cultural inquiry. This year’s edition counts among its participants not just artists like Paweł Althamer, Latifa Echakhch, and Camille Norment, but also some distinguished writers: the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, for one, and the novelist Sharmistha Mohanty.

 
Babette Mangolte
Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna
Opens December 18

Better known as the cinematographer for the late Chantal Akerman, Mangolte is an experimental filmmaker in her own right, helping pioneer and articulate a female filmic perspective where none existed. This retrospective presents a vivid documentation of 70s New York and celebrates what the French-American transplant calls the “language of women.”

 
Behold the Man: Jesus in Israeli Art
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Opens December 20

And a merry Christmas to all! This extensive exhibition stretches as far back as the 19th century to observe how Jewish, Zionist, and Israeli artists, including Marc Chagall and the contemporary photographer Adi Nes, have looked to Christ as a symbol of suffering, rebirth, and troubled nationhood.