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Not very long ago, many New York galleries stopped organizing summer group shows. Historically, they had almost always been an essential, annual programmatic happening for commercial art galleries throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. To their discredit, though, these shows sometimes felt a bit like afterthoughts; galleries seemed to dig out unsold inventory from years past in the hopes of attracting a city vacation-goer, so the bar was often fairly low for inventiveness or curatorial merit. However, the galleries that have stuck with this tradition have proven the worth these exhibitions bring to the art ecosystem.

We picked five of our favourite group shows on view this summer.

A group show at Berry Campbell in Chelsea celebrates the work of 24 women artists living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area and the impact each of them has had on the history of abstract expressionism in the United States. The 1940s and 1950s marked a moment of significant transformation in American art, often characterized by East Coast artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who broke away from representational art to embrace nonrepresentational forms. But there was an equally experimental and forward-thinking group of women artists in California who were also expanding the possibilities of what art looked like and represented. Made mainly during the 1950s and ’60s, the works on view provide a glimpse into the inventive ways in which these artists worked and pushed the limits of art and were pivotal players at the earliest stages of the AbEx movement working its way through the U.S. The exhibition is accompanied by a wonderful essay by historian Frances Lazare about the historical context and significance of these works.