You could be forgiven for not knowing that Betty Parsons was an artist – arguably one of the finest of her generation. The storied dealer of abstract expressionists such as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko (the ‘great big shots’, as she called them), Parsons never exhibited her own work in her eponymous New York City gallery – the legendary artist-run space avant la lettre on Manhattan’s 57th Street, which she steered from 1946 until her death in 1982, aged 82. She was too busy championing other artists (many of whom, like herself, were women and/or queer, including Forrest Bess, Judith Godwin and Agnes Martin), especially after many of her ‘big shots’ subsequently moved to Sidney Janis Gallery in the same building or Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery on nearby 58th Street.
A Show Recognizes Legendary Art Dealer Betty Parsons – As An Artist
Frieze
September 9, 2026
‘Betty Parsons: An Expanded World’, 2026, exhibition view. Courtesy: Hessel Museum of Art; photograph: Carter Seddon
On her days off, Parsons painted lyrical abstractions: airy, bright and bold acrylics on canvas that veered towards the meditative, mystical and musical. This wasn’t always the case, however, as seen in the artist’s retrospective at the Hessel Museum of Art, deftly co-curated by Kelly Taxter and painter Amy Sillman. Titled ‘An Expanded World’, this exhibition of some 80 pieces reveals how Parsons’s works on paper from the 1930s, including a watercolour portrait (Emmanuel Bove, 1930) and a landscape rendered in gouache and graphite (Canary Islands, 1932), later gave way to oils and acrylics on canvas by the late 1940s. Throughout the 1960s, Parsons prolifically painted one jaw-dropping acrylic abstraction after the next, while in the ’70s, she fashioned whimsical painted sculptures out of construction debris and driftwood, working from her stunning home studio designed by the artist Tony Smith in Southold, Long Island.
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