In case you wondered: Not every aspiring painter of the postwar years was a white male; it just seems that way from a shortlist of the Abstract-Expressionist heavyweights. A few women made headway – Frankenthaler, Krasner, Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning – but their careers invariably bloomed later and less brightly than those of the guys.

One extraordinary woman prevailed in another way. As a gallery dealer, Betty Parsons (1900-82) helped Pollock, Rothko, Still, Newman, and other male artists during their early careers. She also exhibited – often simultaneously – the work of many women. “Betty Parsons and the Women,” which fills two floors of Anita Shapolsky’s brownstone gallery, includes the work of five such artists, along with Parsons’s own paintings.

The catalog tells of remarkable, and remarkably different, lives. These women studied with the likes of Picabia, Gorky, and Hofmann, and works by all of them are in major museum collections. Together their 30 works, which date mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, remind us that Abstract Expressionism was neither a monolithic movement nor an intrinsically male one.

Four paintings by Buffie Johnson (born 1912), probably the best known of the five, give an idea of her evolving style. In “The Three Worlds” (1949) midnight blues, flecked by dramatically lighter notes, conjure a fantastical city at night. Jostling yellow and orange patches in the completely abstract “Sun Wedding” (1961) condense into calligraphic marks – betokening, perhaps, her growing interest in subconscious symbols.

The paintings of Judith Godwin (born 1930) are the most aggressively gestural here. In a painting like “Longing” (1958), her every impulse seems recorded, unmediated, in the broad strokes that reach powerfully upward. Elsewhere, organic shapes and luscious colors and surfaces distinguish four abstractions by Ethel Schwabacher (1903-84). Six pieces by Jeanne Reynal (1903-83), all executed in mosaic, are surprisingly spontaneous in their textural explorations. The meticulous, geometric forms of Jeanne Miles (1908-99) suggest mandalas, their aura of spiritual searching enhanced by details of applied platinum and gold leaf.

While Parsons never exhibited her own work in her gallery, she did show elsewhere. The exhibition includes a brightly colored wood construction from her later years and several earlier paintings notable for their vigorous self-possession. “Looking Out” (1957) is especially fine; sturdy notes of cobalt and black, punctuating a circulating perimeter of viridian and khaki greens, impart a lyrical but muscular breadth.

“Betty Parsons and the Women” implicitly asks us to consider how sexism shaped postwar art. The intriguing glimpse it offers of six careers isn’t sufficient to shape new, sweeping judgments, but it prompts two observations: Overall, there’s less declarative aggression of iconic “Ab-Ex” works – less of de Kooning’s recklessness, or Kline’s bravado, or Newman’s hieratic reductiveness – less, in short, of the urge to publicly demonstrate a new historical measure.

There are also a number of pieces here that, on the basis of their formal energy and invention, show impressive strength of character and seriousness of purpose – the qualities we expect of any enduring art. We are left with some rewarding paintings, and some lingering questions. Was macho demonstrativeness the defining aspect of the Abstract-Expressionist aesthetic? Or did Ab-Ex’s potent blurring of the distinctions between searching and finding, discovering and declaring, call for the inclusion of many temperaments?

***

What to make of someone who painstakingly dabs scenes of polo matches and fox hunts with his fingertips? John Parks is not in fact a caretaker of a faded Derbyshire estate but a gainfully employed American resident. Even so, he seems to feel nostalgia for his British upbringing. In his goofy paintings, bearskin-hatted guardsmen await buses (double-decker, naturally), hunt game, and golf.

The precision of his imagination, capable of herding dozens of people, horses, and hounds into place, contrasts intriguingly with his clumsy technique. It would all amount to entertaining froth, were it were not for the images’ painterly weight. In “Aiming” (2005), the compact notes of crouching hounds and a hunter’s crooked form give plastic force to the portent of a pointed musket. Pressures of color in “Duck Hunt” (2004) securely and vividly locate figures and trees among the undulating folds of a verdant landscape.

In other words, Mr. Parks can paint, though you might guess that he’s temperamentally unsuited for the kind of in-your-face brushwork and imagery that would gain him the quickest attention. If the finger-painting and antiquated motifs are subterfuges to earn a second, deeper look, they work.

***

Charles Searles’s death at 67 last November turned his fourth solo exhibition at June Kelly into a memorial show. The sculptures in this handsome installation, all produced in his final year, reflect the stylized, biomorphic forms that absorbed the artist for more than three decades. Unlike earlier pieces of polychromed wood or painted aluminum, all 11 of these modestly scaled pieces are of patinated bronze. Their crisp surfaces – invariably a matte black, a deep mottled green, or a metallic brassiness – have the pleasing effect of sculpted jewelry.

The titles (“Katwalk,” “Strolling,” “Two Step”) echo the playful jauntiness of their rhythms, which might best be described as angular African motifs tamed by Modernist idioms. The impression is neatly heightened by the lively shadows cast on walls and floor. There’s little of the anxiety of Giacometti’s early sculptures, or of the plastic intensity of Arp’s exacting, accelerating contours, and Searles’s relaxed joyfulness can feel a bit repetitive when seen by the roomful. Taken singly, however, there’s plenty of satisfaction in their celebratory energy.

Parsons until July 15 (152 E. 65th Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues, 212-452-1094). Prices: The gallery declined to disclose its prices.

Parks until July 18 (113 E. 90th Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues, 212-987-4997). Prices: $4,000-$10,000

Searles until July 29 (591 Broadway, between Prince Street and Houston,212-226-1660). Prices: $5,500-$12,500.