As Bess wrote to Meyer Schapiro in November 1951, “God knows I know no other trade than fishing and painting and the army in which I could survive. But more important the visions continue which means that there will be paintings."

Forrest Bess’s works have been shown extensively, including solo exhibitions at the Camden Art Centre (London, UK - 2022) and the Fridericianum, (Kassel, DE- 2020). In 2018, Bess was included in Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art, which traveled to the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) and the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA).

Bess’s work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s (New York, NY) group exhibition Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney's Collection in 2016. In 2013, the Menil Collection (Houston, TX) hosted a major survey of Bess’s work titled Seeing Things Invisible, curated by Claire Elliott, which traveled to the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Neuberger Museum of Art, (Purchase, NY), and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, (Berkeley, CA). In 2012, Robert Gober curated a room of Bess’s work for the Whitney Biennial (New York, NY). Bess received the Mark Rothko Foundation Grant in 1973. Bess’s works reside in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), the Menil Collection (Houston, TX), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston TX), The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), among many others.

Dr. Jack Weinberg emigrated with his family from Kiev, Russia (now Kyiv, Ukraine) to Chicago after World War I. He received his M.D. from the University of Illinois in 1936 and completed his psychoanalytic training in Chicago in 1942. Dr. Weinberg was on active duty in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, at which time he met and started treating Forrest Bess. 

Dr. Weinberg was Clinical Director of the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute, a consultant to the Veterans Administration, a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois, and an important contributor to the psychiatric literature. 

In the 1970s Dr. Weinberg received several prominent awards for his work in gerontology. He served as President of the APA Illinois District Branch (1966–67), as a member of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and as Treasurer (1973) and President (1977-78) of the American Psychiatric Association.