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It's hot, the streets are dusty: the sun was just before its summer turning point and had set glisteningly, aligned exactly with the street grid, at the end of the high-rise canyons. "Manhattanhenge" is what people in New York call it, they push themselves to the busy intersections, fearless in traffic, to shoot the perfect picture. Then the sooty, tawny smoke from Canada's wildfires swept across the streets, turning the city into an eerie backdrop: the end of the world seemed imminent. He didn't come, for now. Instead, you saw something blossom; a vision, or at least a possible promising future. With a seismographic flair, the art scene takes a look beyond the current situation. In the museums and galleries of the metropolis: female and diverse perspectives, self-determination.

For almost a decade, the Chelsea Arts District has been viewed from above: from the High Line, an old freight train route that has been converted into a mile-long park. The Hudson River and the harbor are close by, and the old warehouses were home to many of the world's most important galleries in the 1990s. Below you walk through wide, bare streets, past desolate, brick-walled facades, behind large windows: paintings, sculptures, bright, white rooms. The Gagosian Gallery on 21st Street is attracting the public with a major show (until June 24) about the New York photographer Richard Avedon, who died in 2004. He had his finger on the pulse of glittering show business, culture and politics in front of his lens: Marilyn Monroe, Claudia Schiffer, Samuel Beckett, Louis Armstrong, Andy Warhol and members of his Factory. It is an impressive look into a past that cannot be shaken. Or?


A few blocks away, this is exactly what is being worked on: the reinterpretation of (art) history. Two exhibitions there deal with the largely and for a long time very little noticed artists of Abstract Expressionism from the West Coast, the San Francisco Bay Area. While their male colleagues celebrated their successes in New York in the 1950s, the female artists created their expressive, non-figurative, gestural paintings and sculptures in a kind of bohemian enclave around the California School of Fine Arts. There was an atmosphere of free experimentation in San Francisco. "There wasn't any of that macho shit. When I first came to New York, I was appalled at the disregard for women artists. I think San Francisco was different

Sonia Gechtoff is one of 24 artists who, in a lengthy research effort, are bringing gallery owners Christine Berry and Martha Campbell back into the limelight in New York (until July 1). They specialize in female artists from the 1950s who "may have been overlooked for years," as Christine Berry puts it. A 2016 exhibition at the Denver Art Museum on "Women of Abstract Expressionism" was the impetus for this show.

Gechtoff's somber, dramatic 1959 painting The Chase hangs in alignment at the end of the gallery, catching the eye of the oncoming visitor. "Maybe the picture is about gaining recognition in the art world," Berry muses. The paintings in the gallery seem to come from a familiar and at the same time new world: expressive, bright colors, wildly applied brushstrokes reminiscent of the informal, abstract landscapes that blur under layers of squeegeed paint. Of course – women could do that then (and can now) too.