Is the Summer Group Show in New York Going the Way of the Dinosaur?

Periodically, a close-up image of a smiling Ed Sheeran will pop into my head, jolting me into consciousness. I’m no fan of Sheeran’s music, so I don’t spend much time thinking about him. I do, however, think a lot about that picture, which is in fact a painting—a six-and-a-half-foot square canvas by Jana Euler, in which Sheeran’s face is pressed uncomfortably close to the viewer, his reddish beard and dreamy blue eyes appearing to warp ever so slightly.

The work’s title, Shape of Painting, Summer Hit 2017, alludes not just to Sheeran’s chart-topping 2017 song “Shape of You,” but also to this bizarre 2018 artwork’s inclusion in a summer group show, “Painting, Now and Forever, Part III.” Co-organized in 2018 by Greene Naftali and Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, the medium-centric show came just as painting was rising anew. Zombie Formalism, an informal movement whose purveyors produced market-friendly abstractions, had recently spurred some critics to pronounce painting dead. Now, these two galleries set out to prove those naysayers wrong with a mix of figurative and abstract canvases. Within two years, figurations like Euler’s would appear in seemingly every New York gallery. At the time, those paintings were rare sights.

“Painting, Now and Forever, Part III” seemed so unfashionable back then that I am still mulling it over six years later. I bring it up because this past summer, there were few New York group shows like it—no risk-taking spotlights on strange and new developments in art. And “Painting, Now and Forever” was not the only such show that season; as in many other years, a number of thought-provoking shows helped move the needle forward. But this year, a sad batch of group exhibitions seemed to prove that an unsteady market yields safe presentations of mostly forgettable art.

Consider Greene Naftali’s offering this year: “On Landscape,” a banal smattering of paintings of sunlit fields and leafy trees that held none of the pizazz of “Painting, Now and Forever, Part III.” “On Landscape” did assemble some nice historical works, among them a diminutive 1920 Albert Burchfield watercolor depicting a hot sun beating down on the grass below. There were some charming contemporary artworks too, including brushy vistas courtesy of Brett Goodroad and meta meditations on the genre courtesy of Thiago Hattnher, a young artist who paints pallid walls hung with landscapes. But on the whole, I emerged with no new understanding of what makes a landscape tick.

Greene Naftali’s peers also took the safe route, staging vague, unfocused shows centered around motifs and mediums. Two blocks away, Luhring Augustine was showing “Patterns,” an unimaginative spotlight on artworks that make use of repeating motifs. The premise, thin to begin with, was stretched to its limits by the size of this show, which covered not just Luhring Augustine’s sizable Chelsea gallery but its Tribeca one too. In Chelsea, there was a shaped canvas by Frank Stella from the ’60s, a vast tile mural by Brazilian modernist Athos Bulção, and an effervescent denim piece by Loretta Pettway Bennett, a Gee’s Bend quilter now in her 80s. How many similarities were there between these works, really? Not many, by my measure. The nonsense comparisons did a disservice to all the pieces.

Downtown, Andrew Kreps Gallery staged “Eighteen Painters,” a diffuse selection of emerging artists who had almost nothing in common other than their chosen medium. That had the adverse effect of flattening a lot of artworks that may have looked better on their own. Not even a stunning Nash Glynn self-portrait, showing the artist standing in an open field, a water-filled vessel obscuring their bared genitals, thrived here.

Perhaps even more telling, however, was the number of galleries that opted not to stage a summer group show at all. Matthew Marks, the “Painting, Now and Forever” cohost, closed two of its three Chelsea spaces to the public this summer. The third remained open, but there was nary an artwork to see, since there was a book sale here in place of a show.

The gallery giants mostly sat this one out as well. Pace Gallery and Hauser & Wirth kept their May solo shows on view for extended runs that spilled into the summer. David Zwirner technically mounted a group show, but it was merely another edition of its annual exhibition of art by the gallery’s staff, and it was up less than a month.

In the strictest sense, Gagosian did have a multi-artist exhibition: “Icons from Half a Century of Art,” whose anodyne name disguised the sheer value of what was on offer. Alongside pieces by Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, Gerhard Richter, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, there was reportedly an Andy Warhol painting of Chairman Mao valued at more than $100 million. The show remains on view through November, but unlike just about everything else in Chelsea, it is open by appointment only. I can’t see it, and you probably can’t either, unless you are a deep-pocketed collector. Good luck getting in.

For years, many dealers have used the summer group show as a thinly veiled means of clearing inventory during a slow period, upgrading their exhibitions with half-baked curatorial ideas. (See Kreps’s “Eighteen Painters,” whose release claimed the presentation was “a way to  look beyond paint’s physical application, to demonstrate its continued vitality as a  tool for research and exploration,” whatever that means.) But others have deployed their summer group shows more thoughtfully, using them as a testing ground for talents to watch.

That takes us back to “Painting, Now and Forever, Part III.” Greene Naftali’s portion of that show included some gallery artists like Euler, Alex Israel, and Monika Baer, paired with ones not on the gallery’s roster, including the Chinese painter Gang Zhao, who went on to have a solo exhibition with the gallery the following year. Without his having appeared first in a group show, Gang might never have secured that one-person show.

In that way, summer group shows function like tryouts for artists, especially for ones who are just starting out or are still building a reputation. Critics, collectors, and curators can visit these exhibitions to get a sense for up-and-comers worth following, and dealers can determine from the sales which artists are worthy of further investment. And in the case of a show like “Painting,” which had a solid curatorial thesis, artists are also provided a framework for their work, enabling them to map how their art overlaps, whether conceptually or stylistically, with that of their colleagues.

The platonic ideal of a summer group show fulfills all those criteria and then some, and it was certainly possible to find great exhibitions of that kind in New York as recently as 2021. By then, many galleries had accepted the chaos of the pandemic, capitalizing on all the indeterminacy by staging more experimental offerings.

Gagosian, a gallery that had almost exclusively shown white artists before 2020, signaled a shift in its programming with “Social Works,” a big, bold exhibition curated by Antwaun Sargent that focused on how Black artists navigate community and architecture. The show’s standout was Black Wall Street Journey #5 (2021), a 16-foot-long abstract painting by Rick Lowe that obliquely alluded to a white-led massacre of a Black community a century earlier in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Though he was already acclaimed for founding Project Row Houses, an influential organization that repurposed shotgun-style houses in Houston as art spaces, Lowe had shown in New York only a handful of times before “Social Works.” Not long after the exhibition closed, Gagosian began representing Lowe. In 2022 he appeared in the Whitney Biennial.

Other identity-focused group shows sprang up at blue-chip galleries in that exhibition’s wake. Last year, at Lisson Gallery, there was “Distribuidx,” which assembled an intergenerational range of Latinx and Latin American artists, from the young painter Frieda Toranzo Jaeger to the septuagenarian Vivian Suter. The year before that, at Deitch Projects, there was “Wonder Women,” an exhibition of Asian American women and nonbinary artists, most of whom are figurative painters.

Blue-chip galleries continued to mount shows in the vein of these exhibitions this year. “The Selves,” at Nicola Vassell Gallery, focused loosely on how artists have considered their inner lives. It even included a “Wonder Women” alumna: Sally J. Han, who exhibited at Vassell a memorable painting of her grandmother, slumped over in front a TV displaying color bars, as though she’d passed out while watching. “Soft Fantasy/Hard Reality,” at Silverlens, ambitiously charted how artists from Asia and the Asian diaspora have visualized real histories pressing up against imagined ones.

But generally, galleries tended toward lighter fare, and that made Timothy Taylor Gallery’s “The Dog Days of Summer” the most emblematic show of the moment. The exhibition featured dozens of canine-focused artworks from roughly the past century. Some of these pooches were adorable, like the scruffy mutt that appears in Trisha Baga’s 2022 painting Orange monkey (which, despite its title, does not portray a primate). Others were more mysterious, like the slender pup shown staring at its own reflection in Paul-Sebastian Japaz’s forebodingly titled 2024 canvas This is the thing that comes for each of us. None of them made me think very hard, though—especially because I found myself distracted by the dogs that came through the gallery to drink from water-filled bowls laid out for them. I left my own terrier mix at home, but I have a feeling he might have gotten more out of this show than I did.

“The Dog Days of Summer” had a cutesy premise and inoffensive offerings, and in that way, it typified the tameness that characterized the majority of the nearly two dozen group shows I saw this summer. So you can hardly blame young artists for retreating from galleries altogether and striking out on their own.

In a run-down Upper West Side apartment, artist Amalia Ulman and curator Nick Irvin staged “MiCasa,” a themeless group exhibition that loosely alluded to the history of the family that previously resided there. In an area that Irvin and Ulman termed “Dad’s secret room,” they installed Hito Steyerl’s Lovely Andrea (2007), a naughty video about the artist’s past as a bondage model. In homage to some of the kids’ scribbles on the walls, Irvin and Ulman asked SoiL Thornton and Whitney Claflin to create some scrawls of their own. Other oddities abounded: a cross formed from sealed condoms by Bruno Zhu; a pastel drawing of sausages by John Kelsey; a sculpture of a seated figure crafted from seashells by Mitchell Algus, who is better known as a Lower East Side dealer than as an artist.

“MiCasa” felt like an anarchic expression of dissatisfaction with the market here in New York. Tired of white-cube spaces, these artists went for a setting that looked like a hovel. The AC may not have been very good, and the unit seemed just barely up to code, but in existing on the fringes of the city, these artists found a summertime respite together.

Surveys of artistic networks have traditionally been the stuff of museums, but this summer, they also appeared aplenty at New York galleries. Call it the backward-looking group show, a format meant to expose groups of artists that weren’t previously accepted within blue-chip spaces.

The venturesome gallery 47 Canal departed its longtime digs in Chinatown for SoHo, opening with “Summer with Friends and Family,” curated by G. Peter Jemison. This Seneca artist led the American Indian Community House between 1978 and 1985, and he used the opportunity at 47 Canal to continue his decades-long project of upholding Indigenous artists in his orbit. The artist list for this show bore just one well-known name, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith; the rest of the participants were hardly famous in New York, a city where almost none of them had ever shown before.

Jay Carrier (Wolf Clan, Onondaga/Tuscarora Nations) towered above the rest, exhibiting a brightly hued painting in which a wolf-like humanoid emerges from an abstract background, its middle fingers raised to the viewer. Meanwhile, Hayden Haynes (Seneca, Deer Clan) showed the memorable sculpture Pretendians (2024), featuring a figure with a Pinocchio-like nose who was garbed in an American flag. Attached to a bracelet whose beads spell out the word representative, this sculpture alluded to the array of people who have claimed to be Indigenous, only to have their carefully constructed identities unmasked as a sham. This work asks a tough question: Who gets to be a representative of a culture, and why? Here, the sculpture acted as a barbed meta-critique of identity-oriented exhibitions like this one.

A short walk away, at Ortuzar Projects, there was the revelatory “Five Women Artists in 1970s Los Angeles,” featuring a quintet of feminists who have yet to receive their due on the East Coast. The best of the bunch, Susan Singer, showed BODIES (ca. 1976–77), an oversize ring binder whose pages were cut into horizontal quarters, so that viewers could mix and match the body parts on them. A penis from a nude Allan Kaprow could be flipped beneath the naked breasts of artist Barbara T. Smith, effectively imploding the gender binary. Works like BODIES deserve canonization. Let’s hope a group show like this can kickstart the process.

At Paula Cooper Gallery, there was “Tabula Rasa,” a buzzy exhibition that mapped the influence of the late photographer Sarah Charlesworth. Expected characters figured here, like conceptual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who questioned the truthfulness of images in the media at the same time as Charlesworth. But the exhibition proved most insightful for the way it demonstrated Charlesworth’s impact on her students, among them photographer Deana Lawson, who took Charlesworth’s MFA class at the Rhode Island School of Design. Though they seem highly naturalistic, Lawson’s pictures—such as the one featured here, showing a woman seated on a sofa—are often staged. “Tabula Rasa” suggested that Lawson, much like Charlesworth, has eroded the division between fact and fiction to a point where it barely exists.

“Tabula Rasa” implied that the past exerts a strong gravitational pull on the present. According to this show’s logic, Charlesworth’s art of the 1980s, with its imagery appropriated from the media, remains alive today, whether it’s obvious or not. But what of the future? Charlesworth may have died in 2013, but why not show some of the artists who are carrying her art’s themes into the 2030s and beyond? One of the select few young-ish artists to feature in this exhibition was Charlesworth’s daughter, Lucy Charlesworth Freeman. If nepotism or personal connections are what it takes to be in a summer group show like this one, that’s bleak.

Backward-looking group shows like “Tabula Rasa” can take us only so far. What we need, in the summer of 2025, are the return of challenging multi-artist presentations that move things forward. Ironically, the title of the Paula Cooper exhibition cites the very thing New York dealers need right now: a blank slate.

A version of this article appears in the 2024 ARTnews Top 200 Collectors issue.