Frances Barth teaches at Maryland Institute, College of Art, and previously at Yale University. She has exhibited extensively in the United States. She is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Texas, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, among others.

Her significant awards include, the Joan Mitchell Award, Adolphe and Esther Gottlieb Grant, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants.

"I have been trying to create a heterogeneous kind of painting space, where spatial viewpoints shift, and ways of representing nature shift, where drawing plays a vital role in painting, and where "abstract color" lives alongside "local color" - all with seeming ease and grace to give physical presence to conceptual content." Frances Barth, 1998

"Barth does not paint traditional landscapes; rather she uses the perspectival, historical and symbolic complexities that landscape painting offers as a counterpoint to a carefully considered modernist flatness and planarity." - Richard Kalina, Art in America, 1994

"...these come out at the end sui genesi - like nothing so much as themselves. And is this not what every artist strives to make, something special, informed, resonant, relevant and effective?" J. Bowyer Bell, 1997.