[citation needed] In 1970, while at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa (where he taught from 1964 to 1986),[5][6] Schwarz co-founded South Bear School, an innovative summer arts school (pottery, painting, poetry, et al.) in a former hospital house in Highlandville, Iowa (population 30), adjacent to a trout stream called South Bear Creek.
At various other times, he has studied traditional pottery in Japan, researched Pre-Columbian pots in Panama, and worked as a restorer with an archaeological dig in Israel.
In one of his trips, he met with the aging German sculptor Gerhard Marcks, who had been Wildenhain’s form master at the Bauhaus, and, in another, he and Geraldine Schwarz interviewed British potter Bernard Leach.
These experiences, not unlike his earlier quest to visit the studios of famous potters, reflect his continuing interest in historical sleuthing, especially as it relates, non-exclusively, to the tradition of ceramic art.
Related to those inclinations, he and/or Geraldine Schwarz (often in collaboration with others) have written, compiled and sometimes published books having to do with historic issues, both local and international.
Among these, for example, are Conversations with the Recent Past (Luther College Press, 1975), a collection of oral history interviews with rural residents in the vicinity of Decorah, Iowa; and Paddled Tails from Tattled Tales: An Autobiography of a Family (South Bear Press, 2001), consisting of archival photographs and oral history interviews of their own family members.
In this volume are essays, memoirs, diaries, letters, interviews and other written documents by or about such Bauhaus- or crafts-related persons as Josef Albers, Ruth Asawa, Theodor Bogler, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Trude Guermonprez, Shoji Hamada, Bernard Leach, Otto Lindig, Gerhard Marcks, Daniel Rhodes, Peter Voulkos and Frans Wildenhain.