"I paint on panels with oils. In my paintings people keep going through the interruptions of their lives symbolized by the shapes that disrupt them."
Sheila Schwid, born Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1932 (Two By Two Client #7, 2022)
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Painter | Storyteller | Witness of Time
Sheila Schwid is a 92-year-old painter whose work is shaped by a lifetime of observation, reinvention, and quiet rebellion. A resident of Westbeth Artists Housing for more than 50 years, she continues to create vivid, multilayered paintings from the same West Village apartment where she once raised her children—now transformed into a
luminous working studio.
Born in Milwaukee in 1932 and raised in Omaha, Schwid began painting as a child—at age 8, painting watercolors of flowers in the backyard with a simple pan set and jar of water. By 10, she was selling crayon pin-ups to neighborhood boys, and by 13 she was working in oils. She studied art at Omaha University and the Art Center School of Los Angeles, later moving to New York in 1959, where she immersed herself in the downtown art scene, participated in Happenings, and exhibited at 10th Street galleries. But like many women of her generation, Schwid’s own practice was often sidelined by the expectations of marriage and motherhood. “I thought he knew me as a painter,” she once recalled of her then-husband, artist Jay Milder. “And he said, ‘Women can’t paint.’”
Schwid never stopped creating, even as she prioritized raising her three children and teaching in New York City public schools. After retiring in the 1990s, she recommitted to painting with a fresh urgency. Her recent series, Reflections on 14th Street, captures New Yorkers through bus windows—fractured, layered, and luminous. “There were reflections, and reflections of reflections,” she wrote. “Strange shapes… smoky colors… people’s heads interrupted by windows that looked into the sky.” These shapes, she says, represent the interruptions in our lives—the sudden noises, sirens, advertising, media, lies, etc. Yet these people just keep going. “I paint their portraits with respect and awe.”
Though not originally intended as political, Schwid discovered that her paintings are exactly that—and she now feels it’s essential to name it. Her work reflects the reality of public life, the struggle for identity, and the quiet resistance in simply being seen.
The series has been exhibited at Westbeth Gallery and Carter Burden Gallery, where she is represented, alongside AMP Gallery in Provincetown and Two By Two Media. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, and the Staten Island Arts Examiner. In 2023, Schwid received the prestigious Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant, recognizing her lifetime dedication to art.
Schwid paints with clarity and compassion but resists easy interpretation. “I can’t control how people will feel,” she says. “But that doesn’t relieve me of the responsibility of making the best painting possible.” With a sharp wit, cropped brown hair, and endless curiosity, she is still evolving, still experimenting, and still showing us how to see.
