The exhibition Betty Parsons: An Expanded World at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art showcases Parsons’s achievements as an artist, framed within her inescapable status as a legendary American gallerist. Parsons used the term “expanding world” to mark her breakthrough from realism to abstraction during the late 1940s, as well as to express her own sense of manifest destiny: “I was always looking for the expanding world, in a way, which is a very American world. The European world; everything is surrounded by walls. In America everything is wide opened.” In this spirit, the exhibition’s co-curators, curator Kelly Taxter and artist Amy Sillman, have assembled an expansive survey of Parsons’s art practice, complemented by two well-paced ten-minute films by G. Anthony Svatek and Kaija Siirala that detail her personal and professional trajectories. Taken as a whole, An Expanded World offers a timely and detailed view into the world of Betty Parsons and her artmaking.
The exhibition smartly opens with a moving-image encapsulation of Parsons’s storied work as an art dealer. From its outset, the Betty Parsons Gallery encouraged collaboration with artists like Barnett Newman, steadfastly maintaining an artist-engaged orientation. As a gallerist, Parsons relied on her well-trained eye, patrician decorum, and new world practicality to shape the careers of groundbreaking artists from Ad Reinhardt to Robert Rauschenberg to Agnes Martin. Today her fame is inextricably tied to the pivotal years of Abstract Expressionism, especially as embodied by her so-called “giants”: Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Newman. Yet critical interest increasingly acknowledges the diversity that energized Parsons’s enterprise. As a gallerist, she represented many artists other than the straight men she is most commonly associated with, including women like Lee Krasner, Ethel Schwabacher, and Perle Fine, as well as LGBTQ+ artists like Bradley Walker Tomlin, Theodoros Stamos, and Sonja Sekula. Parsons herself was queer (her early partner and artistic mentor was Anglo-Irish painter Adge Baker), and An Expanded World works hard to marry Parsons the person with the unique success of her gallery.
