A Conversation on Agnes Martin, Betty Parsons, and Coenties Slip

This event will take place at:
- Dia Beacon
- 3 Beekman Street
- Beacon, New York

Co-presented with Dia Beacon and the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Free with Dia Beacon admission.

On the occasion of Agnes Martin: Painting is not making paintings at Dia Beacon and Betty Parsons: An Expanded World at the Hessel Museum of Art, this conversation will draw connections between the two artists’ respective practices and circles of friends and colleagues. After their first meeting in 1954, Parsons profoundly influenced the trajectory of Martin’s output when she urged Martin to move to New York in 1957. With Parsons’s support, Martin relocated from New Mexico to Manhattan’s Coenties Slip neighborhood and had her first solo exhibition at Parsons’s gallery a year later. In this program, Kelly Taxter, curator of Betty Parsons: An Expanded World, and Prudence Peiffer, author of The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, will consider Martin’s and Parsons’s intersecting yet distinct artistic sensibilities and positions in the New York art world in the mid-century, especially in relation to peers such as Chryssa, whose survey was on view at Dia Chelsea in 2023, as well as Ray Johnson and Ellsworth Kelly.

Prudence Peiffer is an art historian, writer, and editor, and the director of content at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. She is the author of The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever (2023), which won the New York City Book Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. The Artists of Coenties Slip (2024–25), a collection exhibition at MoMA based on the book, was co-curated by Peiffer with Samantha Friedman and Rachel Remick. Peiffer’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, New York Review of Books, New York Times, and Washington Post, among other publications and exhibition catalogues. She received a BA in the history of art from Yale University; a PhD in modern and contemporary art history from Harvard University; and a postdoctoral fellowship from Columbia University.

Kelly Taxter is an independent curator and the deputy director of Artists Space, New York. She is the co-curator, with artist Amy Sillman, of Betty Parsons: An Expanded World at the Hessel Museum at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York (2026). From 2013 to ’21, she was the Barnett and Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art at the Jewish Museum, New York, where she organized major surveys of work by Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Rachel Feinstein, Jonas Mekas, and Isaac Mizrahi; projects with Math Bass, Eliza Douglas, Eva LeWitt, Willem de Rooij, Valeska Soares, and Vivian Suter; and thematic group exhibitions, including Unorthodox (co-curated with Daniel S. Palmer, 2015–16), Take Me I’m Yours (co-curated with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2016–17), and After “The Wild”: Contemporary Art from The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection (2023). In 2003 she co-founded the gallery Taxter & Spengemann with Pascal Spengemann. She earned an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and a BA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Boston.