Paul D. Schweizer, Ph.D.

Paul D. Schweizer, a museum administrator, art historian, and educator, is Director and Chief Curator of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute’s Museum of Art. He received his Ph.D. in the history of art from the University of Delaware, where he was a Unidel Fellow, and wrote his dissertation on color theory in the art of the nineteenth-century English landscape painter John Constable. For the past decade Schweizer has been an Adjunct Professor of Art History at Pratt at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, an extension center campus in Utica of the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, N.Y. Previously, he taught art history at St. Lawrence University and the University of Delaware. He has lectured throughout the United States, as well as in Canada and Europe.

At the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Schweizer organized the following four exhibitions: Ferdinand Richardt: Drawings of America, 1855-1859 (2007); Alex Katz: a Drawing Retrospective (1991); The Art of Trenton Falls, 1825-1900 (1989); and The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints (1984). He co-curated the 2009-10 exhibition, James E. Freeman 1808-1884: An American Painter in Italy; and co-authored the exhibition catalogs, Auspicious Vision: Edward Wales Root and American Modernism (2007), and Life Lines: American Master Drawings, 1788-1962, from the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute (1994). He also was the principal author of the exhibition catalog, The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints (1984). Additionally, he edited and was a contributing author of the book, Masterworks of American Art from the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute (Harry N. Abrams, 1989).

In 1996 he wrote the first in-depth study of the American still life painter Rubens Peale for the catalog that accompanied the National Portrait Gallery’s 1996 touring exhibition, The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770-1870. In 1979 he authored the Delaware Art Museum’s exhibition catalog, Edward Moran (1829-1901): American Marine and Landscape Painter.

Articles that Schweizer has written have been published in the following scholarly journals: Art Bulletin, Artibus et Historiae, American Art Journal, Imprint, American Art Review, Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Nova Scotia Historical Review, The Clarion, the Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, and the Quarterly Journal of the St. Lawrence County Historical Society. He has also authored collection catalog essays for the Albany Institute of History and Art, the Worcester Art Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, the Sewell C. Biggs Museum of American Art, the Nantucket Historical Association, and the Schwarz Gallery, Philadelphia.

Schweizer is a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors and a trustee of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center. He was president of the board of directors of the Gallery Association of New York State, and president of the board of trustees of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center. Previously, he was a trustee of the Museum Association of New York, a member of the visiting committee of the Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, and a senior scholar of the now-defunct Peale Painting Project.

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