Betty Parsons Exhibition at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art Receives Multiple Positive Reviews
The Betty Parsons Exhibition at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art has received praise in numerous outlets.
The Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies has received a new round of reviews for the exhibition, “Betty Parsons: An Expanded World.” Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, and Cultured all recently published glowing reviews of the exhibition. Parsons was a gallerist who championed abstract expressionist painters such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman, though her own artistic work has largely gone unknown to the general public. The exhibition, which opened in June and runs through October 18, 2026, is the first major exhibition of Parsons’s work. It features over eighty pieces, including sculptures and paintings spanning sixty years, along with two commissioned films exploring Parsons’s career. “Taken as a whole, An Expanded World offers a timely and detailed view into the world of Betty Parsons and her artmaking,” writes the Brooklyn Rail.
“For the magnificent exhibition,” writes Cultured, “curator Kelly Taxter and artist Amy Sillman focus on the artistic aspects of [Parsons’s] legacy, gathering 81 of the paintings, works on paper, and sculptural assemblages that she created on the days she had off from being a dealer. Across these objects, her confident use of color and her assured gestural marks demonstrate that she was driven to make art, and did so in abundance, despite the time constraints of running a business promoting others.”
Parsons’s work will be discussed as part of an upcoming event, “A Conversation on Agnes Martin, Betty Parsons, and Coenties Slip,” on September 26 at Dia Beacon in Beacon, NY.
The Center for Curatorial Studies is an incubator for experimentation in exhibition-making and the leading institution dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies. The Hessel Museum of Art, built in 2006, presents experimental group exhibitions and monographic shows and also draws from the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art for exhibitions.
Post Date: 09-09-2026
“For the magnificent exhibition,” writes Cultured, “curator Kelly Taxter and artist Amy Sillman focus on the artistic aspects of [Parsons’s] legacy, gathering 81 of the paintings, works on paper, and sculptural assemblages that she created on the days she had off from being a dealer. Across these objects, her confident use of color and her assured gestural marks demonstrate that she was driven to make art, and did so in abundance, despite the time constraints of running a business promoting others.”
Parsons’s work will be discussed as part of an upcoming event, “A Conversation on Agnes Martin, Betty Parsons, and Coenties Slip,” on September 26 at Dia Beacon in Beacon, NY.
The Center for Curatorial Studies is an incubator for experimentation in exhibition-making and the leading institution dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies. The Hessel Museum of Art, built in 2006, presents experimental group exhibitions and monographic shows and also draws from the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art for exhibitions.
Post Date: 09-09-2026