NEW YORK, NY.- The traditional summer lull in the art gallery calendar typically spurs a rash of phoned-in group shows, a chance to drag unsold works out of storage and repackage them under limp catchall themes. Not so much this month in Los Angeles, where several eye-catching solo exhibitions feature artists who are overdue for a moment in the sun.

On the evidence of these shows, there’s no single dominant trend in art right now, but rather a general sense of permission to take seriously a broad spectrum of artists and positions, especially those of older generations. In this late-summer heat, it’s a welcome respite.

‘Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard’

Through Jan. 25. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles; 323-857-6000; lacma.org.

At 95, the Venezuelan-born Magdalena Suarez Frimkess has waited a long time for her first museum retrospective. Trained in Chile as a sculptor, she came to the United States on a fellowship in 1962 and met Michael Frimkess, a classical ceramist. They were soon married, and settled in Los Angeles. After he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she began applying her pop-inflected imagery onto his elegant vessels, painting them with colored glaze.

This exhibition of ceramics, furniture, paintings and drawings at LACMA, curated by José Luis Blondet, takes its title from an astute review in Art in America by Paul Harris: “The work of Magdalena Suarez Frimkess — the most daring sculptor working in Chile — is distinguished by the finest disregard for whatever is supposed to be so.”

While Michael Frimkess made traditional vases and pots, his wife enlivened them with animals, portraits of her family, cartoon characters like Porky Pig, Olive Oyl and the popular Chilean character Condorito. Ignored by the Los Angeles art world, she was uninhibited by critical expectations.

Soon, Suarez Frimkess was making her own cheerfully lumpy ceramics, which dominate in this show. The earliest work is an undated dish bearing the Venezuelan national crest; the most recent is a similarly irregular plate, made this year, decorated with a transcription of her CVS medication label.

Blondet tries to make a case for Suarez Frimkess’ connections to the wider art world. (A yellow Josef Albers painting from 1969, which — according to a wall text — may have influenced a painting by Suarez Frimkess hanging alongside, is particularly incongruous.) Rather, her work is delightful because of its insulation from the usual ambitions and anxieties of influence that bedevil artists. And that is why, no doubt, she is admired by many younger artists who have collected her work.

‘Social Abstraction’

Through Friday. Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills; 310-271-9400; gagosian.com.

Many artists dealing with race in their work have, in recent years, used representational language — often figurative — to set out forceful identitarian positions. “Social Abstraction,” a two-part exhibition in Beverly Hills and Hong Kong, curated by Gagosian director Antwaun Sargent, assembles 13 Black American artists whose work allows for less prescriptive readings through more ambiguous forms, while still embodying the artists’ individual racialized perspectives.

Several artists fuse together rough-and-ready found materials with exquisite preciousness: Eric N. Mack delicately stitches a silk Christian Lacroix scarf with strips from a cotton apron and Irish linen; Kahlil Robert Irving covers his small ceramic sculptures with photographic decals and gold and silver luster glaze; Alteronce Gumby inserts polished pieces of agate and bismuth into panels of shattered glass.

Gagosian Beverly Hills is not a particularly difficult space in which to hang art, but the impact of works in this exhibition depends largely on their placement — and, boringly, on their scale.

Large works easily project self-assurance and gravitas, while decent smaller pieces, such as Kevin Beasley’s series of intimate paintings, made from fluffy raw cotton and colored resin, or Devin B. Johnson’s single brown painting, get lost. Even Allana Clarke’s “Witness Me” — a sculpture made of black latex hair bonding glue, nearly 6 feet tall — is diminished by the big white wall it’s leaning against.

It may be obvious to note that Rick Lowe’s collage-based abstraction owes a lot — too much — to that of Mark Bradford. However, in this company, opposite Mack’s confection of fabrics, and around a corner from Cameron Welch’s “The Golden Thread” — an astonishing mixed-media mosaic — it finds new affiliations. It is fitting that such an exhibition should open unexpected avenues of meaning rather than just reinforce things we already know.

‘Linda Vallejo: Select Works, 1969-2024’

Through Sept. 21. Parrasch Heijnen, 1326 S. Boyle Ave.; 323-943-9373, parraschheijnen.com.

To visit Linda Vallejo’s show is to drift among various art historical currents of the last half century, as processed by an eco-feminist, Chicana artist born in Boyle Heights, the Los Angeles neighborhood where this gallery now stands.

The exhibition reveals how Vallejos traveled from “Untitled III” — a colorful abstraction from 1969 partly made with potato prints — to “The Impotence of Violence,” a hanging sculpture of two giant machine guns sewn from red and white canvas, made this year.

Between these poles of material experimentation and overly didactic conceptualism there are wonders aplenty. Vallejo’s start was in printmaking, which she combined with drawing and painting. In the late 1970s, she began cutting and folding her lithographic prints, then combining them with bits of wire, stone and wool into potent sculptural assemblages evoking cockamamie scientific models, or ritual objects, that she encased behind vacuum-formed clear plastic domes.

Through her involvement with Native American, Aztec and Maya cultures, Vallejo came to believe that women are “part of the earth,” as she put it, and her work increasingly described a union of the female body and the natural world. Highlights of this exhibition include two 1990 sculptures that combine sticks and tree branches with paper pulp, metal and abalone shells to conjure totems, part human, part arboreal.

If it appears that Vallejo’s work jumped around too much, look harder. That potato print from 1969 shares with its neighbor — the acrylic “Electric Nude 1,” from 2010, depicting a female figure in painted pixels — an interest in cellularity, in the individual pieces that constitute a body, or a field, or a society. Vallejo was always thinking big, it seems, so her subject matter flits back and forth from the micro to the macro.

Mark A. Rodriguez

Through Sept. 7. Chris Sharp Gallery, 4650 W. Washington Blvd., Los Angeles; 213-262-9944, chrissharpgallery.com.

It would not be wrong to say that Mark A. Rodriguez, for his exhibition “Forever,” presents a new series of framed prints. Except: The prints are all American postage stamps, and the frames are elephantine crusts of Sculptamold modeling compound, painted in sometimes garish shades of acrylic. More sculpture than picture, the works combine the ironic wit of the ready-made with the sincerity of the handmade craft object.

One way of decrypting these artworks is as metaphors, the “forever” stamps standing in for paintings. (It’s apt that the exhibition coincides with a significant downturn in the art market.) The lumpy frames may evoke our sentimental attachment to collectible things, or the care we take to protect them.

Rodriguez is best known for his work collecting bootleg cassettes of Grateful Dead concerts; in past exhibitions, he displayed them as wall-mounted sculptures. In one sense, “Forever” is a continuation: Rodriguez has assiduously selected series of stamps — different years, different designs — even though the colors of their frames bear no obvious correspondence to the stamps they envelop. (His paint application is gorgeous, by the way: think of the layered colors of Ken Price, or the painted plaster surfaces of Franz West.)

These stamps represent a symbol of Americana, in light of which their “forever” designation of enduring value seems hubristic. In the backroom of the gallery, similar works by Rodriguez feature vintage stamps commemorating Apollo 8 (6 cents) and Johnny Appleseed (5 cents). They drive home that “forever,” as it pertains to the American future, today seems a very old-fashioned idea.

James Hayward

Through Sept. 14. The Pit, 3015 Dolores St., Los Angeles; 747-273-8240; the-pit.la.

When someone has spent their whole career refining ways of making a painting from just one color, you should pay attention to what they’ve learned. This survey of mainly monochromatic paintings by James Hayward (born in 1943) begins in the 1970s, when he made more-or-less flat oil paintings such as “Automatic Painting 66 x 66 Neutral Grey” (1976). The austere gray canvas is what the art historian Kirk Varnedoe would have called “a picture of nothing.” It’s also sublime.

No hand-painted surface is entirely featureless, of course, and Hayward must have realized that inevitable imperfections could be distracting, even if they also compelled viewers to look harder. Over time, he experimented with texture, developing a method for applying paint in loosely crosshatched thick swipes, which would cover a canvas like stucco. The majority of paintings in this regrettably overhung exhibition derive from that process.

Near the entrance, two recent tondos slathered unevenly in ultramarine and another in putty pink are — compared with most of Hayward’s methodically honed surfaces — rather abject. But since the artist made them after half a century of study, they’re hard to dismiss.

Far more seductive are velvety-smooth paintings done in acrylic on vertical strips of ebony. A group of these, “The Ecstasy,” from 2000, takes its title from Bernini’s 17th-century altarpiece, “The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa.” But ecstasy is also what one feels when absorbed by the best of Hayward’s seemingly simple but deeply considered paintings.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.