Award-wining artist and retired art teacher Constance Wain Schwartz dies at age 91

With her artist’s eye and teaching skills, Constance Wain Schwartz created works to highlight civil rights and to help young and old realize they had an inner Picasso.

She was an award-winning artist and a retired East Islip schools art teacher, whose activism reflected the tumultuous times of her era as she marched for peace during the Vietnam War, women’s rights, migrant farmworkers and racial equality, family and friends said.

At the long-closed Freedom Center, a Huntington storefront at which low-income families could get help, she had volunteered to teach preschool children who could not get services due to income and their race, they said. At a recent exhibition, her collage of photographs and images, titled “Quilt of Concerns,” raised questions of race and societal values over who should get COVID vaccines first.

“Her life and her art were one,” said friend Lita Kelmenson, who met Schwartz when they taught art at the East Islip School District. “She had this kind of internal empathy for people. She understood people, when they needed help and when they needed a shoulder to cry on. I just found her to be a wonderful, warm person, one of those very decent human beings that you wish more people were like.”

Schwartz, of Huntington, died last Saturday after a brain injury. She was 91.

Several forms of art

She had explored several forms of art, including watercolors, collages, printing, calligraphy and woodcuts. Her series of vegetable lithographs in watercolor highlighted delicate details, such as the root tendrils in leeks. She’d often pick up a leaf, a bird’s nest, a piece of metal and other objects on the ground for her multimedia creations, family and friends said.

Her exhibited works garnered positive reviews and local awards; one art writer for Newsday found a “mythic and mysterious quality” in Schwartz’ creations.

Schwartz stretched her art skills. She taught art therapy classes for caregivers and children with disabilities. She was on the board of the Huntington-based B.J. Spoke Gallery, an artist cooperative that held a retrospective of her work in 2012. She ran the art gallery at her church, the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington. 

She was an instructor at Hofstra University, The Heckscher Museum of Art, various art centers and at East Islip schools from 1971 to 2003. As a teacher, she wouldn’t tell students what to do but instead ask them what they thought and guide them to a solution, those who knew her said.

During the pandemic, she continued working as Huntington Town’s art instructor in the seniors division, a job she held for more than 20 years. In a note to her students, she proposed various art assignments, pleading with them “PLEASE don’t judge your work harshly!” and suggesting ways of coping with the unsettling times. “Our creative resiliency is alive and well,” Schwartz wrote.

“She was a dynamo,” said daughter Leslie Leff of Massachusetts. “She was endlessly telling us how special we were and how amazing we were … She was always intent on helping people. She was very interested in the connection between art and the things that couldn’t be expressed using words.”

Studied with noted artists

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, Schwartz moved to Long Island after marrying the love her life in 1952, Mel Schwartz, whom she met when they were both counselors at an upstate summer camp. 

Mel found her beautiful, Leff said, and Connie admired his “rugged” skills that included building a treehouse for the camp. The two were opposites who complemented each other in several ways, the daughter said. For example, Mel laughed at his wife’s corny jokes, like the time she saw a sign selling “fresh eggs” and she told her husband, “don’t be fresh, eggs,” Leff said.

Schwartz earned her bachelor’s in fine arts from Queens College and her master’s from Long Island University. She studied with some noted artists, including Dong Kaufman, a watercolor master, her family said.

Every week for decades, she and several women, who had met during their activist years in the 1960s, would gather to discuss social causes and support each other in their family and career lives.

In what was dubbed the Tuesday Lunch Club, Schwartz would be teased for her perpetual lateness; she often was asked to bring dessert instead of the first course, said member Joan Graham of Northport.

But the lateness was also a cause for admiration, Graham said: “She was so there with you she would forget her appointments coming up. Connie never worried about rushing. That was kind of an inspiration in away. So what if you’re late?”

Besides Leff, Schwartz is survived by daughter Eve Cohen of Patchogue and sister Wendy Keating of Virginia. 

A service was held Friday morning at the Gutterman’s Funeral Home in Woodbury.