About the Artist

Beth Ellen Ames was born in 1936 in New York City. As a girl, she attended the Art Students League and the New York High School of Music and Art. Swartz was awarded a Bachelor's Degree at Cornell University in art and education and went on to earn a master's degree in art education from New York University. In 1959 she married Melvin Swartz, an attorney and moved to Arizona. She taught in Scottsdale for five years, then quit to devote time to her art and to having a family. A multi-media painter, Beth Ames Swartz is inspired by her desert surroundings, her Jewish heritage and the cultures of Native Americans and Asians. Swartz co-founded and managed the International Friends of Transformative Art from 1988 to 1999. The organization provided grants for artists pursuing themes that combine the spiritual and the ecological. During this period Swartz moved back to New York City for several years to allow her work wider exposure through exhibitions. Beth Ames Swartz later left New York, traveled extensively in Southwest Asia and returned to her home in Paradise Valley, surrounded by the Arizona desert landscape.