There are too many Bay Area galleries to name or do justice to in this limited space, but here's a not necessarily comprehensive survey of what's coming up this fall. Take a look.

Intersection for the Arts (re) collection – a Collaboration with Lost and Found: Family Photos Swept by the 3.11 East Japan Tsunami is a group exhibition where seven American, mostly Bay Area artists respond to the thousands of photographs recovered from Yamamoto, one the areas most devastated by the cataclysmic undersea earthquake that triggered a tsunami with waves of up to 130 feet off the coast of Japan. New works will be installed adjacent to these found photographs, remnants of a past literally swept away by forces of Biblical proportion. (Sept. 12-Oct. 27) www.theintersection.org

SF Camerawork Gerald Slota: Story. Slota's defaced, torn photographs reveal secret histories and subterranean narratives; they often begin life in his journals on pages crammed with pieces of black-and-white images that caught his eye, random jottings, drawings, and sketches done with darkroom chemicals. The exhibition explores the artist's process, projects, journal excerpts, and photographs from six bodies of work. (Through Oct. 27) www.sfcamerawork.org

Steven Wolf Fine Arts Brent Green: To Many Men Strange Fates are Given. The ingenious artist, self-taught animator and storyteller Brent Green imaginatively mixes high-tech paraphernalia with battered contraptions and his American folk roots, orchestrating disparate elements into unexpectedly harmonious combinations. His latest project weaves LCD screens, 3-D animation, polarized lenses, wooden audio horns and the tale of a custom-made spacesuit designed for the first canine astronaut. (Sept. 15-Oct. 20) Scott Williams: Home Invasion runs concurrently. www.stevenwolffinearts@gmail.com

Jack Fischer Gallery Minor Characters and Sympathetic Criminals. Painter Frances Lerner's androgynous, doll-like figures with obliterated facial features are bit players on life's stage, the people we walk by and never notice. In scenes she has staged with Japanese and French dolls dressed in drab Victorian clothing, they fade into the semi-industrial settings and sweat shops which threaten to engulf them. (Sept. 22-Oct. 20) www.jackfischergallery.com

Earth Shaman (1989), acrylic on canvas, by David Hare.
(Photo:Courtesy Weinstein Gallery)

Weinstein Gallery mounts intriguing shows (Leonor Fini last July was spectacular), and their exhibition of paintings, sculpture and works on paper by David Hare continues the trend. Born into a prominent New York family, Hare, a pivot point between the European avant-garde and hot, young New York artists, lived among the Surrealists in the city during the late 1940s, as it was evolving into the epicenter of the art world. That mind-bending Surrealist sensibility, facets of abstraction and humor infiltrate Hare's colorful paintings (sometimes collaged) like one starring an imposing, lavender dream lion with a piercing orange eye, or the red-flecked, ebony monster of "Earth Shaman," whose insides glow like a stoked furnace. Many of the artist's wonderful pen, ink and watercolor drawings are of animals, real and conjured, and then there are witty sculptures such as "Dog and Snake," depicting a duo in a high-noon standoff, and "Man Running," a wiry figure with a pair of fully extended, supple limbs that ensure a first-place finish. (Sept.22-Oct. 25) www.weinstein.com

The Skin Within (2011), oil & enamel on canvas, by John DiPaolo.
(Photo: Courtesy Dolby Chadwick Gallery)

Dolby Chadwick Marshall Crossman, Big Water. Sometimes employing a "wet-on-wet" style, Crossman paints voluptuous, color-drenched canvases that beautifully render the trance-like, contemplative state induced by the relentless ebb and flow of expansive ocean and endless horizon seen from her beach-front home. In other works, intrepid (fantasy) bathers splash in icy surf, and proud local fisherman show off the catch of the day. (Through Sept. 29) Flesh and Blood presents paintings characterized by Sherie Franssen's athletic style. (Oct. 4-27) This display of John DiPaolo's expressive, emotionally charged, abstract paintings will mark the culmination of his 40-year career. (Nov. 1-Dec.1) www.dolbychadwickgallery.com

UC Graduate School of Journalism Rag Theater: The 2400 Block of Telegraph Avenue, 1969-1973. Nacio Jan Brown, who started as an underground photographer, made a commitment to a dodgy block in Berkeley teeming with hustlers, stray dogs, junkies and cafe regulars, and captured the circus in his black-and-white images. (Through Jan. 11, 2013) www.journalism.berkeley.edu

Bancroft Library Fiat Lux Redux: Ansel Adams and Clark Kerr. Fifty original photographs chronicling the U.C. expansion, originally commissioned by former U.C. president Clark Kerr, for a 1967 book marking the university system's centennial, have been chosen from over 605 prints signed by Ansel Adams. The exhibit also includes supplemental material on the forward-thinking, controversial Kerr. (Sept. 27-Feb. 28, 2013) bancroft.berkeley.edu/Exhibits/onexhibit.html#fiatlux

Haines Gallery Binh Danh: Yosemite. Photographers who've experienced the astonishing wonder of the Valley have been struck by the dramatic light falling across the gigantic natural monuments and waterfalls. Heightened eerie light is the salient feature of Danh's in-camera daguerreotypes here. They're the product of a three-year investigation involving modified large-format cameras which produced unique, ethereal images reflecting the photographer's interest in the 19th-century Western vista master Carleton Watkins. (Through Oct. 27.) www.hainesgallery.com

Wrestling God (2012), graphite and soil on paper by Dana Harel.
(Photo: Courtesy the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris)

Gallery Wendi Norris Dana Harel: Wrestling God addresses transformation, physical struggle and the internal war between the spiritual and "brute self." An architect by training, Harel, an Israeli-born artist and stage designer, has created four large-scale, theatrical and visceral graphite portraits and action scenes, as well as a cluster of smaller mixed-media pieces, inspired by the Biblical story of Jacob wrestling with an Angel. The supernatural, epic saga from the Book of Genesis has fascinated poets and painters from Rilke, Rembrandt and Delacroix to Chagall. (A live sound component will be performed Oct. 13.) Stellar Orbits: Lovers and Intellectuals among Surrealists and Their Peers. Given their credo of free love and the amount of bed-hopping and torrid affairs engaged in by this loose cadre of artists, not to mention their fierce cerebral debates, it's amazing they got anything done. This show looks at art by Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning and others through the prism of their relationships, creative attractions and distractions, conflicts and sexual entanglements, of course. (Both shows: Sept. 6-Oct. 27) www.gallerywendinorris.com

Gallery 16 Charles Linder: New Sculpture. Utilizing poetry and puns, Linder, an artist said to be fascinated equally by the sublime and the absurd, fashions beautiful objects from detritus. His oeuvre includes handmade chandeliers, a black pig named Conrad, its body a pinata of pink lights, in apparent conversation with a 1956 Spyder Porsche convertible parked nearby, and an array of perforated gas-can lanterns connected by a tangle of wires suggesting a science experiment gone awry. (Through Sept. 29) An artist with a pessimistic world-view who was once described as "literate without being literary, and painterly in a tortured sort of way," Martin McMurray, working primarily in acrylic on panel for this exhibition, makes gemlike, whimsical books whose illustrated narratives frequently deal with human frailty, errors, unfortunate accidents and moral failings. (Oct. 5-Dec.1) www.gallery16.com