On the summer of 1957, Martin accepted Betty Parsons' invitation to move to New York and show her work at Pace Gallery.
After living with Parsons for a brief period, she settled in Coenties Slip, a neighbourhood that was then home to artists such as Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Lenore Tawney and Jack Youngerman.
During the Coenties Slip years, she was hospitalised repeatedly. One winter, she fell into a trance in a church on Second Avenue, triggered when she heard the first few notes of Handel’s Messiah (although she loved music, it was often too emotionally stimulating). Another time, she was admitted to the notoriously chaotic Bellevue psychiatric hospital after being found wandering Park Avenue, uncertain of who or where she was. Before friends located her and had her moved to more salubrious environs, she was given shock therapy.
