Sarah Belchetz-Swenson (1938-2021) was a painter, portraitist, and printmaker.
Belchetz-Swenson was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1938 and grew up in Larchmont, New York. She joined the Art Students League in New York at thirteen and majored in studio art at Oberlin College, focusing on modern and historical painting and printing techniques. She briefly engaged with the New York art scene, supported by fellow artists, including her cousin Rudolf Baranik (who wrote the introduction to her Holocaust memorial Revisions) and the feminist painter May Stevens. She later moved to Johnson, Vermont with her husband, Victor Swenson and their two daughters. Following a divorce in the early 1990s, she settled in Williamsburg, Massachusetts.
Rites, Belchetz-Swenson's most widely-exhibited work, is a series of fourteen paintings, four monotypes, and four lithographs, linking scenes from the lives of contemporary women and girls with images from the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii.
