Beth Ames Swartz

The film had a one night premiere at the Phoenix Art Museum in February, 2015. It premiered on Arizona PBS Friday on March 31, 2016 and aired again on April 3, 2016. The film is currently available to PBS stations in the United States.

A Moving Point of Balance was reinstalled at the Walter Art Gallery in Scottsdale on March 1-March 30, 2015, and was featured in the documentary film Beth Ames Swartz: Reminders of Invisible Light.

In 2008, Arizona State University published a catalogue titled The Word in Paint with essays on The Thirteenth Moon paintings along with poetry by poets from the ASU MFA Creative Writing Program, written in response to Swartz's paintings.

In 1996, Swartz discovered Shen Qi, a philosophical system that advances the belief in spiritual bonding through community. She produced a series of paintings based on Shen Qi using gold leaf to superimpose a gold grid onto under-images as a meditative technique. Swartz wished to entice a “quite tranquility” in the viewer. The paintings, composed of acrylic, gold leaf, and mixed media on canvas, have a powerful, emanating energy, as patterns of reds, blues, and violets are interrupted and transformed by patches of celestial gold. Some of the paintings contain all three colors while others are predominantly dark red or blue, which creates a stark contrast with the vibrant gold leaf.

The series A Story for the Eleventh Hour was a continuation of Swartz's work with the earth and its spiritual significance and connection to humankind. In Swartz's previous series, The Wounded Healer, from 1991, she referred to the inborn hurt and renewal of the shaman. The title of the series derives from the wounded healer concept described in Jean Houston's book The Search for the Beloved.

In response to her mother's heart attack, Swartz created her Celestial Visitations series, consisting of fifteen paintings with the figure of an angel. In Kabbalah, the angel symbolizes the good deeds performed in one's lifetime. Swartz created the angel figures with the hope that “their presence might help my mother go to heaven." Her mother Dorothy Ames passed away in March 1988, a day after Swartz completed Celestial Visitation, #5.

A Moving Point of Balance series premiered at the Nickle Arts Museum in Calgary, Canada in 1985. The exhibition toured to nine museums in the United States through 1991 and was presented at the first Medical Arts Conference in New York in 1993. It is a participatory installation designed with specific light and sound to be experienced as a healing environment. The series of seven paintings are based on the seven East Indian chakras. These chakras symbolize parts of the body that govern spiritual, intellectual, and emotional equilibrium. The installation invites participants to activate their intuitive, kinesthetic experience through their participation with the chakras. Each of the paintings is made with metal leaf, crushed crystals, and micro-glitter to give its surfaces a reflective quality in reference to the radiance of the chakra energies. Upon entering the installation participants encounter a medicine wheel meant to guide them to a larger universe and a higher consciousness.

Israel Revisited is a series of works and a conceptual project that originated as an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York and then traveled throughout the United States from September 1981 to December 1983. In 1976, Swartz traveled to Israel where she sought a metaphysical and historical connection with the nation and its land. During the duration of her stay, Swartz located ten sacred sites throughout Israel that were meant to symbolize the women of Israel's historical land. These sites were reconfigured in Swartz's Ten Sites series of works with the memory and spirit of each woman. Queen of Sheba, Rachel, and Rebekah were among the biblical and historical female figures Swartz honored. She specifically chose these women because they symbolized the message of the Shekhinah. This ritual act of uniting women with their land not only honors Jewish women but also celebrates the female principle called the Shekhinah, which is present in Kabbalah as part of the divine entity.

In the 1970s, Swartz started incorporating fire and earth to evoke the beauty that arises from destruction, as a metaphor for the uncertainties of life.

Her most recent exhibition, curated by Robert Pela of R. Pela Contemporary Art, presents a considerable selection of Swartz's art, ranging from the 1960s to 2015. The exhibition was held at the Arizona Jewish Historical Society in Phoenix.

In 1959, Beth Ames Swartz moved to Phoenix, Arizona, with her husband Melvin Jay Swartz whom she divorced in 1984. In 1991 Swartz began living part-time in New York City where she met her second husband, art dealer John D. Rothschild. In 1995, Swartz returned to Paradise Valley, Arizona where she currently resides with John.

Beth Ames attended The High School of Music & Art in New York City, and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, graduating in 1957 with a Bachelor of Science degree. She obtained her Master of Arts degree in 1959 from New York University.

Beth Ames Swartz (born February 5, 1936) is an American visual artist. While primarily an abstract artist, her paintings often incorporate words and symbols representing philosophical concepts shared by people of different cultural world views. Her daughter, Julianne Swartz, is a well-known, New York based artist.