Rosalyn Schwartz has been exhibiting her work for the past thirty years, both nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, and awards, including an NEA Fellowship, a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and a McKnight Foundation Fellowship. In 2010 Schwartz had a twenty-year survey exhibition of her work at the University of Missouri-St. Louis’ Gallery 210 that was accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by Lilly Wei, independent curator and art critic for Art in America magazine. In the fall of 2013, Schwartz had a solo exhibition, A Brief History of Seduction, at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. In August 2014, Schwartz’s work was included in the group exhibition Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Contemporary Painting at the McNay which then traveled to the Akron Art Museum in Akron, Ohio, opening in January 2015. A major, illustrated catalogue accompanied this exhibition. Schwartz’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times. She received her BFA in painting from Washington University, St. Louis, and her MFA in painting from Fontbonne College, St. Louis. In May of 2008, after serving as Professor of Studio Arts in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Schwartz decided to take an early retirement so that she could focus full-time on her studio work and prepare for several upcoming exhibitions. Prior to coming to Champaign-Urbana in 1988, Schwartz taught painting and drawing at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and West Virginia University in Morgantown.
"Style is a word that crops up often in Rosalyn Schwartz’s conversation, inextricable from her perception of the world. Her mother was an accomplished interior decorator and their home a trove of luxurious objects of all descriptions so it is not surprising that Schwartz… would revel in myriad stylistic genres, high and low, from Baroque to Rococo to art nouveau, from Cubism to Surrealism to Pop, from antique objets d’art to modernist design, from kitsch to fine drawings to graphic design to textiles and furnishings… Schwartz’s paintings externalize interior states: psychological landscapes, dreamscapes, fragments of the conscious and unconscious…Despite the extravagant range of Schwartz’s production, it is her fixation on beauty that binds it all together as if her salvation—and ours—depends upon voluptuous objects with their suave, bewitched allure.”
From "Lush Life" catalogue essay by Lilly Wei