Betty Parsons is as important for her distinctive wooden sculptures as she is for the innovative gallery which she ran in New York. Rebelling against her conventional, patrician New York background, she studied art with Zadkine in Paris, where she met Gertrude Stein and Giacometti. Her gallery on 57^th Street was the first in what is now a bustling area for artists and she was gratified to realise that when the National Gallery in Washington held its first major exhibition of American Modern Art ten of the twenty-three artists shown had had their first solo exhibitions with her. Her artists included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Barnet Newman and Saul Steinberg, all at the beginning of their careers.

Parsons visited Ireland many times, attracted here by her friendship with the collector Gordon Lambert and the artist Maria Simonds-Gooding who showed with her gallery.

In her art practice she was one of the pioneers of the found object – in her case, driftwood picked up near her Long Island studio and made into colourful formal arrangements that can be read both as painting and sculpture.