Frances Barth
1946–

Frances Barth (born 1946) is an American visual artist best known for paintings situated between abstraction, landscape and mapping, and in her later career, video and narrative works. She emerged during a period in which contemporary painters sought a way forward beyond 1960s minimalism and conceptualism, producing work that combined modernist formalism, geometric abstraction, referential elements and metaphor. Critic Karen Wilkin wrote, "Barth's paintings play a variety of spatial languages against each other, from aerial views that suggest mapping, to suggestions of perspectival space, to relentless flatness ... [she] questions the very pictorial conventions she deploys, creating ambiguous imagery and equally ambiguous space that seems to shift as we look."

Barth has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and Anonymous Was a Woman Award, among others. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Dallas Museum of Art, and in the Whitney and Venice Biennials. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and Whitney Museum, among others. She is director emerita of the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).