Betty Parsons (1900 - 1982) was an American artist and art gallery owner known for her early promotion of abstract expressionism. Her most famous client was Jackson Pollock. Her work is held in the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Parsons ran the Wakefield Gallery and Bookshop in New York from 1940 until 1944 and in 1946 opened the Betty Parsons Gallery, which specialized in Abstract Expressionism, a genre predominantly associated white heterosexual males. At one time her gallery represented the work of Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and others. Seven of these "Giants," however, left Parsons in 1951 when she would not focus exclusively on them, even though she had promoted their work more actively than that of her other artists. Increasingly she began to show more of her "alternative" artists such as Swiss lesbian Abstract Expressionist Sonja Sekula (1918-1963), whom Parsons represented from 1948 until 1957. She was open about her bisexual affairs in the 1920s and 1930s but she withdrew to the closet after World War II, just as she achieved particular prominence as a dealer. Years later, speaking to her biographer, Parsons explained the need to disavow her lesbianism: "You see, they hate you if you are different; everyone hates you and they will destroy you. I had seen enough of that. I didn't want to be destroyed."
