Beth Ames Swartz

Beth Ames Swartz (February 5, 1936, U.S.A.) is a painter and visual artist.

Primarily working in the idioms of abstraction and semi-abstraction, her paintings and mixed-media works are commonly informed by philosophical and spiritual concepts shared by people of different cultural worldviews, and often incorporate both symbols and words in the vocabulary of their visual language. 

Swartz grew up in Manhattan and by her mid-teens was studying at the New York Arts Students League; subsequently graduating from the High School of Music & Art, Cornell University (1957) and receiving a Masters of Arts degree from New York University (1959).

Swartz moved to Arizona in 1959. Initially, she felt out of place there, where desert rocks, prickly vegetation and open spaces contrasted with the lush greenery from the more familiar settings of her youth. By 1970, she viscerally bonded with the Western environment after rafting trips down the Colorado River.

Beginning in the late 1970’s, Swartz developed a process/ritual producing her “fire work”—art whose creative evolution benefited from the destructive forces of fire and purposeful mutilation that achieved aesthetic transformation.

Swartz initially worked with fire in two major projects. Inquiry into Fire (1978-79) explored the use of fire as a painting medium; a sixty-piece show of this art was the initial exhibition at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts opening in 1978. Israel Revisited (1980-83) declared her feminism by honoring ten women whose contributions to Jewish history were underappreciated. Paintings were initiated with pilgrimage and performance at sacred sites in Israel; soil from the site was incorporated into the paintings.  Conceptually, the use of fire in creating these works also functioned as a cleansing and purifying element.

Healing, as well as pilgrimage and associated ritual, continued to be a prominent theme in her art leading to her next major project, A Moving Point of Balance (1983-85). This endeavor offered visitors a contemplative and healing environment informed by the Hindu chakra system and her own pilgrimages to seven sacred sites in the Southwest and France. Participants viewed seven 7' by 7' paintings by walking into colored light baths thereby activating a different energy center or chakra. Swartz extended her investigation of healing through the chakra system with Trans-Illumination Series (1986). These art works were intuitive internal portraits of twenty-five participants who sat opposite her while she “read” and went through each of their chakras and shared information as she painted.

She has continued to translate her research into various wisdom systems and her own mystical experiences into aesthetic explorations. For instance, Celestial Visitation (1987) channeled and depicted angelic entities that helped her mother embrace her death. Dreams for the Earth (1989) and A Story for the Eleventh Hour (1993) were visions for the healing of our planet. The Thirteenth Moon (2005) produced neo-expressionist, hallucinatory visual translations of poetical thoughts from an Eighth Century Chinese “golden age” brought about by cultural cross-pollination at a time of societal discord that ultimately resulted in population declines of 68%.

With her most recent series, Broken World (2020), Swartz once again found solace by visualizing poetic words. A line from were Hart Crane’s poem Broken Tower (“And so it was I entered the broken world to trace the visionary company of love”) reminds us that an isolating pandemic and political dysfunction may be healed through love. As the Broken World series evolves, it continues her lifelong preoccupation with fire, but now as a visual apparition rather than as a painting technique.

Swartz created and directs pro bono a monthly Breakfast Club for artists with 190 members that has operated for the last 22 years, typically arranging for a guest speaker on a subject of interest to members. Her devotion to this community group reflects her ongoing commitment to a tradition of tikkun olam (repairing the world).

Swartz enjoys recognition that includes over eighty one-person gallery exhibitions, four traveling museum exhibitions originating at The Jewish Museum, NY (1981-83); Nickle Arts Museum, Calgary (1985-91); a retrospective beginning at Phoenix Art Museum (2002-03) and Arizona State University (2008-11). Three books, eight catalogs, reviews in ARTnews, Art in America, and Artforum plus many articles and videos document her accomplishments. PBS stations are airing (2017-24) a 29-minute documentary on her life and art titled Beth Ames Swartz/Reminders of Invisible Light (https://vimeo.com/ 291409573). Swartz received the Arizona Governor’s Individual Artist award in 2001. Her art is in many public and museum collections including The Jewish Museum, The Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Beth currently lives in Paradise Valley, Arizona with her second husband, art dealer and writer John Rothschild.