SCOTTSDALE, AZ.- Tender Alchemy: Beth Ames Swartz and Julianne Swartz presents the works of mother and daughter artists whose distinct practices are united by a shared devotion to transformation, healing, and the invisible forces that shape 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.
Tender Alchemy marks the first time their works are presented together, offering an intimate look at artistic lineage. The differences between their practices are as instructive as are their affinities. Beth’s art is maximalist, saturated, and layered with meaning and color, striving toward symbolic depth. Julianne’s work is minimalist, ephemeral, and fragile in its neutrality. One accumulates density; the other cultivates restraint. Yet both share a willingness to surrender control to process, allowing intuition and material to guide them. Together, their works create an energetic convergence of two artists whose lives and practices are inextricably intertwined.
Beth Ames Swartz began her full-time artistic career in 1964, developing an increasingly experimental practice rooted in the belief that art can support personal inquiry, healing, and spiritual transformation. Working in multi-year cycles of research and creation, she has produced more than fifty-five distinct series over six decades, each informed by rigorous study of wisdom traditions across cultures and eras. The exhibition traces this evolution from early breakthroughs and her iconic ritual-based fire work to the period when her paintings became spaces for esoteric inquiry, situating her within the lineage of 20th-century spiritualist painters.
Julianne Swartz creates artwork 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. The exhibition presents new and recent works that function as finely tuned, multisensory instruments. Using materials such as clay, copper, paper, and transduced sound, she composes objects that balance opposites—soft and hard, delicate and grounded, motionless 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.
The exhibition unites Beth’s Quantum Light paintings with Julianne’s soundscape Gateway, weaving their visual and sonic languages into a shared exploration of continuity beyond the body. Beth’s luminous paintings draw from a childhood belief that people become stars when they die, their souls continuing to shine, and merge science and spirituality through ideas from quantum theory and spiritual teachings. In response, Julianne composes an immersive sonic environment of high-pitched sounds calibrated to resonate through the cranial bones, interwoven with sounds from the immediate world and stellar pulses from distant galaxies, and delivered through ultrasonic directional speakers. Heard and felt simultaneously, these vibrations echo wave–particle duality making physical the concepts of Quantum Light.
Altogether, the exhibition forms a cross-generational dialogue, grounded in tenderness, perception, and transformation. While their methods differ, their intentions echo across time and space, offering complementary visions of how art can serve as a bridge between worlds.
A catalog, co-published with Hirmer, will accompany the exhibition with essays by Susan L. Aberth, Nancy Princenthal, and exhibition curator Lauren R. O’Connell.
Tender Alchemy: Beth Ames Swartz and Julianne Swartz is organized by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Lauren R. O’Connell, curator of contemporary art.
