Tender Alchemy: Beth Ames Swartz and Julianne Swartz

March 20, 2026 - August 23, 2026
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
​Tender Alchemy is the first exhibition to unite the work of mother and daughter artists Beth Ames Swartz (b. 1936) and Julianne Swartz (b. 1967). The two artists have cultivated distinct practices, connected by a shared devotion to transformation, healing, and the invisible forces shaping human experience. Though their materials and methods differ, both engage in a kind of alchemy: a transmutation of matter, energy, and sentiment into forms of quiet power and profound presence.
 
The exhibition unfolds across three galleries. The first surveys six decades of Beth Ames Swartz’s abstract interpretations of universal spiritual themes, revealing her lifelong pursuit of art as a catalyst for inner awakening and collective healing. The second presents new and recent sculptures by Julianne Swartz made as multisensory instruments to attune viewers to the energies that animate the body and environment. The third gallery presents their first collaboration in an installation of Beth’s newest series, Quantum Light, expanded through an immersive soundscape composed by Julianne.
 
Together, their work forms a cross-generational dialogue grounded in tenderness, perception, and transformation and offers complementary visions of how art can serve as a bridge between many worlds.

​​Organized by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Lauren R. O’Connell, curator of contemporary art. Support provided by Sarah and JT Marino, Ann B. Ritt Charitable Foundation, Jill M. Brown, Richard Corton, Nancy and Michael Gifford, Diane and Gary Tooker, Jane and Mal Jozoff, Sally and Richard Lehmann, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, and anonymous donors.

Tender Alchemy: Beth Ames Swartz

​Beth Ames Swartz’s full-time artistic career began in 1964, five years after she moved to Arizona. From that moment on, her practice became increasingly experimental and guided by the belief that art can facilitate personal inquiry and healing. Working in focused cycles of research, ritual, and creation, Beth devotes several years to each new line of inquiry, developing processes that give visual form to spiritual transformation. Over six decades, she has completed more than fifty-five distinct series, each rooted in a rigorous investigation of wisdom traditions across cultures and eras.
 
The first half of the exhibition follows Beth's early breakthroughs, sparked by a pivotal 1970 trip down the Colorado River that helped clarify her artistic vision. She began exploring the energies of earth, air, water, prana (life force), and fire while transforming personal trauma into creative force. These investigations culminated in her iconic fire work, defined through a ritualized process of burning and intuitive mark-making that unites the physical and the spiritual.
 
The second half of the exhibition highlights the period in which Beth's full artistic vision took shape—when spiritual inquiry became the core driver of her work, allowing each new philosophical focus to expand and evolve her life and practice. Beginning with A Moving Point of Balance in 1985, the paintings on view come from a selection of thirteen major series and are grouped into four interconnected themes. While each series emerges from a distinct study, they share a visual cohesiveness grounded in radiant color, symbolic geometry, and an embodied sense of energy connecting Beth to a lineage of 20th-century spiritualist painters.

Tender Alchemy: Julianne Swartz

Julianne Swartz creates artworks that synthesize sound, light, energy, and matter into experiences that are at once intimate and expansive. Working across sculpture and site-specific installation, she invites tactile, auditory, and affective engagement, often incorporating ephemeral or immaterial elements to make subtle energies and emotional frequencies register in the body. Her practice is less concerned with representation than with expanding perception, attuning viewers to the unseen forces that shape experience and suggesting alternate modes of embodiment and empathy.
 
In Tender Alchemy, Julianne presents new and recent works that function as finely tuned, multisensory instruments. Using materials such as clay, copper, glass, and transduced sound, she composes objects that balance opposites—soft and hard, delicate and grounded, still yet vibrating from within. Many emit frequencies calibrated to influence the nervous system, drawing on the artist’s research in vibrational healing and neural entrainment. Sounds hover at the edge of perception, encouraging viewers to slow down and notice how their presence completes the work. Described by the artist as “soft instruments,” the sculptures create environments for embodied attention. Through this quiet choreography of sensation, Julianne opens space for reflection, restoration, and the possibility of transformation.

Quantum Light + Gateway

​Marking the first artistic collaboration between mother and daughter, this gallery brings together Quantum Light, the newest body of work by Beth Ames Swartz, and Gateway, a new soundscape by Julianne Swartz, uniting their visual and sonic languages.
 
Beth’s Quantum Light series draws from a childhood belief that people become stars when they die, their souls continuing to shine overhead. In these luminous paintings, Beth visualizes her search for what might persist when the soul leaves its earthly container. Merging science and spirituality, the series engages ideas from quantum theory, such as wave–particle duality, in which matter exists simultaneously as particle and wave, as well as Adin Steinsaltz’s The Thirteenth Petalled Rose, a classic text exploring questions of existence through spirituality. For the 90-year-old artist, this inquiry into what remains beyond the body is both natural and deeply comforting, articulated through paintings that imagine light as continuity rather than loss.
 
In response, Julianne composes a sonic environment using high-pitched tuning forks, chimes, and bells calibrated to frequencies that resonate through the cranial bones and pineal gland, associated with the third eye and crown chakras. These tones are interwoven with sounds from the immediate world and sounds of stellar pulses from distant galaxies. The high-frequency composition is delivered through ultrasonic directional speakers, an unusual technology that focuses sound into a narrow beam, evoking wave–particle duality as listeners simultaneously hear and feel the vibrations, particularly within the head. This embodied resonance is Julianne’s distinctive strength, bridging the ephemeral nature of sound with the physicality of the human body and enabling a profound attunement to untapped energies.
 
Together, their works invite viewers into a shared space of looking, listening, and feeling, where light and sound blur the boundary between body and spirit, presence and passage.