Championing abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, Betty Parsons remains best known as the founder and driving force behind the Betty Parsons Gallery, which played a pivotal role in the history of modernism. But Parsons also was herself a painter, and continued her practice throughout her long life.
On view in the Newmark Gallery, a series of paintings spanning over two decades of Betty Parsons’ career, which depict her ongoing investigation of landscape as explored through a range of approaches to abstraction. Also included in this exhibition are some of Parsons’ painted driftwood constructions.
Betty Parsons (b.1900, New York City, NY – d.1982, Southold, NY) was an abstract painter and sculptor who is best known as a dealer of mid-century art. Throughout her storied career as a gallerist, she maintained a rigorous artistic practice, painting during weekends in her Long Island studio. Parsons’ eye for innovative talent stemmed from her own training as an artist and guided her commitment to new and emerging artists of her time, impacting the canon of Twentieth-Century art in the United States.