While epoch-defining abstract expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman hosted  photographers shooting their studio actions for features in LIFE magazine during the 1950s and ‘60s, the gallerist who put them on the map, Betty Parsons, stayed home and made paintings. Most of this work never saw light during her lifetime. But yesterday, a major exhibition, Betty Parsons: An Expanded World,opened at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. Image above, courtesy of Alexander Gray Gallery

Organized by curator Kelly Taxter, with artist/Bard alum, Amy Sillman, the show features around 80 works spanning painting, sculpture, and works on paper, tracing Parsons’ voluminous output as she evolved from a young academic painter to a mature abstractionist over a six-decade career. A revelatory and newly commissioned, multi-channel film by G. Anthony Svatek and Kaija Siirala presents the largely unknown history of the Betty Parsons Gallery. Left: An early portrait of th artist, courtesy of the National Museum of Women in the Arts

“Looking expansively at her role in defining 20^th-century American art, this retrospective provides a comprehensive understanding of who Betty Parsons was: an artist, visionary art dealer, poet, aesthete, and restless traveler who was drawn to and supportive of otherness and outsiderness,” said Taxter. “Decades ahead of institutional norms or validation, she gave equal weight to women and queer artists through her eponymous gallery, as well as artists positioned well outside of the established and narrow circuits of the art world, while simultaneously forging her own distinctive artistic path.”

The exhibition also revisits the significant history and lesser-known figures of the Betty Parsons Gallery, credited for nearly single-handedly ushering in the American avant-garde. Though Parsons launched the careers of many major Abstract Expressionists, including Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock, many of these predominantly male artists left after growing frustrated by her minimal interest in the market and ceaseless search for the new and undiscovered.

She remained devoted to artists who were excluded by galleries and major arts institutions at the time, including Agnes Martin, Forrest Bess, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Leon Polk Smith, Sonja Sekula, and Barbara Chase-Riboud, all of whom went on to great acclaim. Parsons also made efforts to present Indigenous art during her lifetime, recognizing its foundational importance to the artists of her generation

Through October 18 at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annendale-on-Hudson, NY Info