[4] Returning to the United States in 1933, she made her home in Manhattan and there studied painting with Hans Hofmann and sculpture with José de Creeft.

"[9] The critic for Art News said the diversity of Ames's works showed her to be "consciously seeking individual expressions for her obvious talents.

In 1947, Ames traveled to Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles with the Dutch-born sculptor, Jacoba Coster, and there was given a solo exhibition at the city's Cultural Center.

[17][20] In 1953, Ames moved from New York to Chicago to look after her aging father and thereafter began to participate in the city's art scene.

[26] When the society held another membership show the following year, the Chicago Tribune printed a photo of Ames calling her "an artist who doubles the excellence of her technique with sentiment, tenderness, and feeling for beauty.

[30][31][32] The Tribune's critic called the flower studies and small abstractions of the Cromer & Quint exhibition "unusually interesting".

[32] This painting was made in 1959 during the original Broadway production of "Sweet Bird of Youth" and was hung in the Martin Beck Theater where the play was performed.

[17][35] The 1958 Arts Club show included a painting, "Dark Birds", which one critic called "powerful, richly toned" and which was reproduced in an article on Ames in the University of Chicago Magazine later that year.

The review was accompanied by a photo of Ames with three large abstract paintings (shown in the box at the top of this article).

[1] The department store exhibition was a large one: 51 works in all, including oil paintings, watercolors, sculptures, and drawings.

[17][36][38] A bronze sculpture named "Young Satyr and Friend" received a purchase prize at the Illinois State Museum show.

[2] The best known of her celebrity portraits include concert saxophonist, Sigurd Rasher; opera singer, Povla Frijsh; classical composer, Paul Nordoff; actor, Geraldine Page; and fashion model Marion Morehouse.

[18][34][40] A reviewer once said Ames did not aim for realism in her portraits believing that "the painting of a human being has the same approach as a landscape or still life—it is the movement created through the color that is more important than the subject.

[1] In another context she said, "It is my experience that the actual process of painting is what is most important because in the elusive search to catch the movement of light and space on a flat surface, one falls so short.

They should be taught technique by indirect means, such as showing foreshortening by holding a pencil upright on the floor and asking the student to draw it from above.

She saw contemporary artists as continuing a tradition that stretched back to ancient times and said it was unhelpful to pigeonhole them by using divisive terminology.

Writing on March 4, lawyer and art collector, Sam A. Lewisohn, complained an "incongruous jumble in the galleries" having "no continuity and no sequence".

In a strongly worded letter, she said the creative energy of artists would persevere despite the "trickery, wars, and material lack of integrity" of collectors and galleries.

She also presciently predicted that, "in spite of all the panic of the little egos to be heard (through the wonderful and terrible devices of publicity), we are on the verge of our own great creative era".

Ames had met Katie and her husband Forrest when she visited Hartley in the chicken-coop studio the Youngs had lent him.

The book was edited by Richard S. Sprague, an English professor at the university who was also responsible for acquiring the typescript and arranging for publication.

The book had a foreword by the art critic and historian Elizabeth McCausland and an afterword by Carl Sprinchorn, a Swedish-American artist known for paintings made in the North Maine Woods.

[50] Another reviewer wrote that "Miss Ames's prose is rarely pretentious, and it has always a pleasant flavor of her artist's eye as she sets the scene for Katie's own story.

The drawings and watercolors are likewise simple, appropriately reflecting both the homeliness of Hartley's final residence and the sense of absence without him.

[53] Her father was Edward Scribner Ames (1870–1958), a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and minister of the Disciples of Christ church.

[23] During her college years, Ames was an active participant in university organizations (sports, rhythmic dancing, a literary club called Mortar Board), but did not do studio art.