Check out summer's top group exhibitions in NYC

More than 50 years ago, the painter Frank Stella banished all vestiges of spatial illusion in his work, by insisting that his paintings funtion as physical objects and nothing more. “What you see is what you see,” he famously said, and variations of the formula by other artists have come down to us over the years. The works here represent the latest in this vein, filtering Stella’s idea through differing shades of a pop-punkish sensibility as seen in works by Bob Eikelboom, Evie Falci, Adam Parker Smith and others.

Books, libraries and literature are the themes in this collection of bibliophilic artworks, some of which incorporate actually tomes. Quotations and allusions to the contemplative delights of reading are all part of the mix in a show that speaks volumes about the role of text in contemporary art. Marcel Duchamp, Anselm Kiefer, Kiki Smith and others search the stacks for inspiration.

A familiar staple of the summer group show is to ask a famous artist to curate a show of lesser-known talents that he or she likes. The choices often reflect the artist’s own aesthetic and range from fresh faces (who are sometimes the curator’s studio assistants) to artists who’ve been around round the block more than once. Since the artist in question here is Jack Pierson, the works here sometimes evince a certain confessional tone and tendency toward personal narratives. Pierson’s selections include works by James Brown, Elisabeth Kley and Stephen Tashjian.

Boesky’s UES townhouse space is the counterintuitively elegant setting for this show spotlighting works with a certain aggressively discomfiting style that runs the gamut from creepy to outlandish while spanning techniques from classical to digital. Adam Cvijanovic, David Opdyke and Letha Wilson are among the artists getting weird.

Jacolby Satterwhite, Cells, still from Reifying Desire 3, 2012 

In this revamp of recent American art history, idiosyncratic visions of the human form take center stage in a round-up of artists culled from four regional groups sharing an exuberantly perverse mash-up of Surrealism and Pop grotesque: Chicago’s Hairy Who; the “Funk” artists of the Bay Area; the members of the influential art-punk band Destroy All Monsters from Ann Arbor, Michigan (which included Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw); and the Providence, RI based performance collective, Forcefield. The range of participants (in addition to Kelley, Shaw and Forcefield, there’s Robert Arneson, Jim Nutt, Peter Saul and Karl Wirsum) is as eclectic as the work itself.

Peter Saul, Black Beauty White Shame, 1966