As art galleries gear down for a summer hiatus, there are several shows in New York, closing this week and next, that will make for a vibrant weekday art tour—two of the shows on in this list close Friday; most galleries are on a summer schedule and closed on weekends. Info courtesy Art Forum.

Ending August 12
Patricia Cronin’s exhibition “Shrine for Girls, New York” highlights brutality against women the world over, such as the 2014 kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls by the terrorist group Boko Haram; the enslavement of “unvirtuous” women by the Magdalene Asylums and Laundries throughout Australia, North America, England, and Ireland, started in 1758 and in operation for nearly 240 years; and the recent killing of two Indian girls, aged fourteen and sixteen, who were raped and hung by a gang of brothers from their village. These works—wooden crates as coffins, piled high with female garments, like hills of shed skins—are harrowingly beautiful. The Flag Art Foundation, 545 West 25^th Street, NY, NY Info

Ending August 12
The British artist John Akomfrah—one of the founding bodies behind the Black Audio Film Collective—has a painterly vision, often realized with profound beauty via the grandeur of film. His interests—remembrance, the repercussions of colonialism, and the African diaspora of the West—come to us full force with his display at Lisson Gallery, Akomfrah’s first major exhibition within the United States. Lisson Gallery, 504 West 24^th Street, NY, NY Info
Guardian review

Ending August 12
A Polaroid 360, a body, and a preternaturally febrile imagination—that’s all Lucas Samaras needs, an artist/alchemist who’s spun endless gold from nearly nothing for sixty years. Here, Samaras’s manipulated self-portraits, almost half a century after their making, still dazzle and confuse. Craig F. Starr Gallery, 5 East 73^rd Street, NY, NY Info

Ending August 19^th
Painter/sculptor/curiosity-shop proprietor Nancy Shaver’s first solo exhibition with Derek Eller Gallery gathers together a slew of thinkers and makers—Charles LeDray, Pamela Lins, Julia Klein, Judy Linn, Kenji Fujita, Beka Geodde, among many others—whose Catholicity in taste and intellect reflect her own. Their powers combined makes for a show that’ll blast the unsuspecting viewer high up into the stratosphere. Derek Eller Gallery, 300 Broome Street, NY, NY Info

Ending August 21
Lucas Samaras’s pastel drawings are eerie, queasy, midnight things, luridly colored and uncomfortably intimate. The forty-eight pieces on display, from 1958 to 1983, are a gift to the Morgan Library from Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace Gallery. They are also hung atop a gorgeous wallpaper Samaras designed specially for this exhibition. The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, NY, NY Info DART

Extended to August 26
Chicago-based artist Margot Bergman’s scintillating images seem borne out of an attitude that’s chipper, strange, and mordantly funny, i.e., unequivocally Midwestern. Active since the 1950s, Bergman here—in psychedelically embellished thrift-store pictures—delights as much as she disturbs. Anton Kern Gallery, 532 Wes 20^th Street, NY, NY Info