NEW YORK—Many a season ago, White Box Gallery, then in Chelsea, put on a Michael Portnoy-curated group show called “Critic as Grist” that included a video by Les Levine in which the artist, wearing a stern expression, informs viewers that “group shows twist the truth.” Despite Levine’s admonition, many New York galleries persist in the annual ritual of mounting the summer group show, often inviting guest curators to concoct displays that, sure, may twist the truth, but do so in intriguing, even titillating ways. The names of these exhibitions, which are opaque and downright loony-sounding as often as they are stingingly clever, are invariably worth the price of admission. (Personally, I’ve long awaited the arrival of a group show made up entirely of loaned pieces and titled “Nice Work If You Can Get It.”)

Many worthy group efforts are on view in Manhattan at the moment, including Harris Lieberman’s “No Bees, No Blueberries,” an absorbing ecosystem of an exhibition curated by Sarina Basta and Tyler Coburn, and Jack Shainman Gallery’s bluntly titled “Works on View,” curated by Katie Rashid and notable for its inclusion of great early works by William Wegman. The accompanying slide show is a group show of some other group shows, with a few surprises thrown in for good measure.

Read about the selections below, and see images in the photo gallery at left.

“Time-Life Part II” at Taxter & Spengemann, through July 30

If, by Levine’s logic, group shows twist the truth, then this show is, well, pretty twisted. A full four group shows commingle in Taxter & Spengemann’s cavernous space, formerly Frank Stella’s studio, on East 12th Street, the gallery having given itself over to presentations previously put on in three other galleries (Galerie Christine Mayer of Munich, Ritter-Zamet of London, and New York’s Wallspace) and a university (Bard Center for Curatorial Studies), as well as a one-artwork contribution from Basel gallery New Jerseyy, in the form of Nathan Carter’s Kuchen Kart, a friendly-looking apparatus that was used to serve pastries during Taxter & Spengemann’s opening. It’s a freewheeling installation, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell who’s who, or what comes from where, but two standout artworks in Wallspace’s section, “Obscene Soft Sounds II,” hold their own. Martha Friedman’s sculpture of an arrangement of cantaloupes made from painted, cast urethane foam and placed on a low wooden plinth, manages, despite its ultra-realistic style, to transcend the workaday supermarket stack and achieve an improbable hieratic elegance. Nearby, Kate Costello’s paper and cement sculpture Leg gives the unsettling impression that the floor has sprouted a limb.

“Your Gold Teeth II” at Marianne Boesky Gallery, through August 15

The press release Todd Levin has penned to accompany his whip-smart exhibition is headlined “curator’s statement,” but it might as well be called a manifesto. Levin scores points right out of the gate for quoting poet Robert Lowell that “art is always done with both your hands” and, oh, ye faint of heart, if you think this is veering perilously toward that recently and unwarrantedly criminalized word “craft,” you’re dead right — Levin comes out with it a few sentences later, after declaring that “hipness ... feels suddenly puerile, meaningless, a sham, another way of simply buying into the system.” Hey, if that means unabashed craftspeople like the late Peter Voulkos and the very much alive Toots Zynsky are on the menu, alongside artists du jour like Sterling Ruby and Roe Ethridge and blue-chip postwar masters like Bruce Nauman and Alighiero E. Boetti, all the better. But press release blah-blah aside, Levin’s show shines not for his rhetoric but for his razor-sharp and alluring juxtapositions. Two are particularly snappy. In one corner of the gallery’s largest room, a mammoth, bulbous piece of Voulkos’s wood-fired stoneware picks up on the curvy figure of a woman, standing slightly contrapuntally, as though swaying to music, in the 1982 painting by Barkley K. Hendricks, Vitamin K for Fun, that hangs next to it. In another corner, a 2008 glass vase by Zynsky, all fiery reds and oranges, is placed on a high plinth, becoming a flame that appears to have lapped at the 2009 collage by young artist Titus Kaphar that hangs above it: The collage depicts merely the top strip of Ingres’s well-known Grande Odalisque, the bottom half of the composition, including all of the nude’s sinuous body save for her head, having been seemingly singed away by the Zynsky. Good curating is about artworks activating each other, and so, bravo, Levin.