(Conifers With Lake and Village)

Betty Bierne Parsons

In early watercolor by the New York artist and renowned gallery owner Betty B. Parsons. This was from the collection of Eleanor Bedell (1904-1975) of Santa Fe who owned the "Trash and Treasures" shop on Palace Avenue and managed the "Native Market", which sold hand made works by local artisans, employing 12 people, 30 weavers, 100 spinners and 50 furniture makers during the depression.

Betty Parsons would spend time in Santa Fe and in Taos, New Mexico where there were a number of Modernist artists, and where, in 1957, she met painter Agnes Martin and agreed to represent her if she moved back to New York.

Parsons' gallery proved to be among the most lasting, crucial art spaces in Manhattan. Recognizing the importance of artists whose work was not yet de rigueur, she exhibited and often helped to launch the careers of such artists like Rothko, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Kelly, Frankenthaler, and Godwin, among many others whose names would become synonymous with the major art movements of their time. After the Abstract Expressionist movement, another wave of artists, such as Jasper Johns, Walter Tandy Murch, Leon Smith, and others would also be featured at the highly coveted space. Parsons would run the gallery until her death in 1982.

Even as she helped shape the art world of America continued to work as an artist. Her style changed in the 1950s from landscapes and realism toward abstraction; additionally, in 1947 she began constructing three-dimensional works from found objects. She showed at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery (NYC); Spanierman Gallery (NY); Virginia Miller Galleries (FL), and Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), and she continued to show at the Midtown Gallery in New York throughout her career.

Two major retrospectives were held in her honor, at the Montclair Art Museum in 1974, and the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in 1992. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.