ACA Galleries Presents Beth Ames Swartz and Meg Hitchcock

ACA Galleries is announces the forthcoming exhibition Different Voices, Unique Visions: Beth Ames Swartz and Meg Hitchcock.

Swartz's recent series The Thirteenth Moon is inspired by three revered eighth century Chinese poets.

Visualizing voices from the poetry of Du Fu, Li Bai and Wang Wei, Swartz creates landscapes that reflect the richness of their philosophic worldviews: Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism.

Swartz has had over 70 solo exhibitions including the retrospective Reminders of Invisible Light: The Art of Beth Ames Swartz, The Phoenix Art Museum, (2002) which was accompanied by a monograph (Hudson Hills Press); A Moving Point of Balance, Nickel Arts Museum, Calgary (traveling 1985-90) and Israel Revisited, The Jewish Museum, NY (traveling 1981-3), among others. Her recent book, The Word in Paint (Arizona State University) accompanied a traveling exhibition (2008-9).

Her work is in numerous museum collections such as: Albuquerque Museum, NM; Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Denver Art Museum, CO; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM; National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA and Tucson Museum of Art, AZ among others.

Meg Hitchcock's text drawings deconstruct the word of God by cutting letters from holy books and rearranging them to form the text of another holy book. A passage from the Bible may be cut and reassembled as a passage from the Koran or letters cut from the Torah recreate an ancient Tantric text. By bringing together the sacred writings of diverse traditions she creates a tapestry of inspired writings, all pointing beyond specifics to the universal need for connection with something greater than oneself.

She studied painting in Florence, Italy at the Cecil Graves Atelier in 1988-89 and graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996, with a BFA in painting.

Her artwork has been reviewed in Art in America (2001; solo show), Artweek (2003; group show) and was featured in an article about up and coming artists in the Bay Area in The San Francisco Chronicle (1999). Most recently her art was singled out in a review in Art in America (November 2010; group show). She participated in the AIM program at the Bronx Museum in 2011.

Visit acagalleries.com for more information.