Barbara Schwartz was an American abstract artist, painter, sculptor and committed art teacher at the School of Visual Arts.

Barbara was born in the Germantown area of Philadelphia, the only daughter of a prodigiously creative household. She was a proud graduate of Philadelphia High School for Girls, where her art career launched. She went on to study at Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned her BFA. She moved to New York and had her first solo show in 1975 at the Willard Gallery.

Towards the end of the 1970s, she aimed to develop abstract painting, including non-Western decorative elements, such as an Islamic influence, as well as integrating geometric with organic forms. Her painted plaster reliefs were associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement in New York.

From 1978, she taught at the School of Visual Arts. In 1979, she was represented in the Whitney Biennial. She experimented with numerous materials, including wood, glass, and metal, and often cast pieces in bronze and aluminum. She used glazed ceramic for her work in the 1990s.

Her last representing gallery was the Andre Zarre Gallery in New York, where she had a show shortly before her death.