Malinowski died in 1942, and Swann decided to live permanently in Mexico City, having her first individual exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1945.
In 1920 she succeeded in taking formal painting lessons with a teacher named Helen Urquhart, then continued at a local art school in 1927, when she married her first husband, Edric Swann.
His research took them to indigenous regions of the United States and Mexico, and Swann collaborated on projects such as studying the market systems of Oaxaca, contributing drawings and photographs to her husband's text.
[3] Swann is best known for her depictions of rural and indigenous life in Mexico, which she found to be a strong source of inspiration, linking their traditional values with her pictorial ones.
For her first exhibit in Mexico Diego Rivera wrote, “The use of divided color that she brings about with insight and sensitivity is one of the qualities in her work that she should strive to retain.” In 1950 Dr Atl noted that “This artist is essentially a luminist, because she paints with light, not in the manner of the Pointillists or the Futurists, but rather according to her own understanding, by creating genuine vibratory sensations in the spectator.”[1]