Labor Day is when the art world takes a deep breath and gets ready to deliver. While many galleries grind to a halt in late August, they will be kicking and screaming to announce a new season by the end of next week.

The big night is Thursday, September 6. Between September 4 and the following weekend, at least 114 galleries will open their September shows, and most of them have chosen September 6 as their kick-off date.

Photography has a strong opening week. In view of the festive atmosphere across town, the first port of call might be the show of Jessica Craig-Martin, the photographer acclaimed for at once wry and sumptuous images of glamorous parties. Her show at Greenberg Van Doren is her first in New York since her exhibition at P.S. 1 in 2001.

Aperture Gallery and Hasted Hunt both open group shows built around the acerbic social commentator Lisette Model. Aperture looks at Model in the company of successors, who famously included her student Diane Arbus, while Hasted Hunt groups her with the Chicago School poetic realist Aaron Siskind and the contemporary Gerald Slota.

Other photographic shows opening September 6 include David Stephenson at Julie Saul, with images of Gothic vaults in European cathedrals, and Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s The Ground, the Root, and the Airat Lehmann Maupin, a show that examines the effects of globalization in Laos. The Yossi Milo Gallery presents Kohei Yoshiyuki’s 1970s infrared images of couples embracing at night in Tokyo parks. It is Mr. Yoshiyuki’s American debut, and his first show anywhere since 1980.

Where Ms. Craig-Martin captures the bathos of revelry, a show at Deitch Projects promises figures of excess with no holds barred. “Mail Order Monsters” surveys a younger generation of painters fascinated by the grotesque. No stranger to excess and festivity, Jules de Balincourt will be showing new paintings at Zach Feuer. His faux-naïve style often entails energetic bursts of line and color put together with manifestly slow craft.

Keeping company with Mr. de Balincourt’s aesthetic are two other shows opening in Chelsea the same night: at Galerie Lelong Emilio Perez, who often works in acrylic and latex on wood panels to produce meticulously fabricated pictures that look like animation stills writ large, and Ingrid Calame at James Cohan. Ms. Calame’s process entails a strange collision of accident and purposefulness, the careful and the careless, as she traces graffiti and paint spillage from the Los Angeles urban environment.

Opening Thursday, September 8 is a book collaboration of artist Wayne Gonzales and poet Vincent Katz, at the Paula Cooper Gallery. Mr. Katz’s long poem, “Judge,” appropriates quotations taken from newspaper accounts of the confirmation hearings for Chief Justice Roberts, while Mr. Gonzales’s images explore contemporary representations of patriotism. Another artist whose work often fuses visual and written language is Joyce Kozloff, who opens a show called “Voyages” at DC Moore Gallery.

Duncan Hannah, opening September 7 at James Graham and Sons, also explores places and times past in a show titled “Wanderlust,” but with more nostalgia and less critique than Ms. Kozloff brings to her work. While his deadpan yet emotionally invested illustration-based paintings often include ocean liners and racing cars, his emphasis is less on the wander and more on the lust: “scantilly clad starlets of the 1960s” are promised in the press release.

In moral contrast are paintings at Margaret Thatcher Projects by Jayne Holsinger that explore the artist’s personal upbringing in a Mennonite community in Pennsylvania. Her portraits have a meticulously constructed, uninflected detail and care that resonates with the values of their sitters.

A puritan mix of quietude and fervor also inhabits the tree paintings by Sylvia Plimack Mangold, who has a show of new work opening at Alexander and Bonin on September 8. “Winter Maple” (2007) records a dense branch structure against a plain sky. The ingredients are there for a dull picture, and yet it is electrifying.

Sol LeWitt, who died earlier this year, will be remembered at both Paula Cooper, opening September 6, and, the following week at Pace-Wildenstein, which will install a series of eight new scribble drawings at its uptown branch. LeWitt’s murals are always executed from instructions and by hands other than the artist’s, making possible posthumous realization of new work.

Historic heavy hitters getting the season off to its start include Frank Stella, whose paintings from 1958–65, the period of his legendary pinstripe black monochrome shaped canvases, are the subject of a show at Peter Freeman in SoHo, and Lee Krasner, the abstract expressionist painter, whose drawings are under view at Robert Miller.

But history needs to be made as well as examined, so it is exciting in this mad deluge to note a leading gallery giving prime-time to a young artist’s debut. Natalie Frank, fresh from Columbia’s Master of Fine Arts program, shows such pictorially ambitious costume drama inventions as “The Danger and the Punishments Grew Greater” (2007) at Mitchell-Innes and Nash’s Chelsea venue, opening September 7.