Paul D. Schweizer, Ph.D.

Dr. Paul D. Schweizer, an historian, educator and museum administrator, was Director and Chief Curator of the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute’s Museum of Art for thirty-one years. He was appointed Museum Director Emeritus by the Institute’s Board of Trustees in March 2012, and continues his affiliation with the Museum as curator of two forthcoming exhibitions of the Museum’s Charles Burchfield and historical American drawings collections, and by working with the Institute’s staff and trustees to strengthen the Museum’s future.

Schweizer holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware, where he was a Unidel Fellow for several years, and wrote his dissertation under Prof. Barbara Maria Stafford on color theory in the art of the 19^th-century English landscape painter John Constable.

For the past decade Schweizer was 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. He previously taught art history at St. Lawrence University and the University of Delaware, and has presented public lectures and gallery talks throughout the United States as well as in Canada and Europe. 

At the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Schweizer personally organized the 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 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 Schweizer 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, and he authored the exhibition catalog, Edward Moran (1829-1901): American Marine and Landscape Painter, published in 1979 by the Delaware Art Museum.  

Articles by Schweizer have appeared in the following scholarly journals: the Art Bulletin, Artibus et Historiae, the American Art Journal, Imprint, the American Art Review, the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts, the Nova Scotia Historical Review, The Clarion, Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, and the Quarterly Journal of the St. Lawrence County Historical Society. He has also written 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 (Dover, DE), the Nantucket Historical Association, and the Schwarz Gallery, Philadelphia.

Schweizer is an emeritus member of the Association of Art Museum Directors, and has twice served as a trustee of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center. He previously was president of the board of directors of the Gallery Association of New York State, president of the board of trustees of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, a trustee of the Museum Association of New York, a Visiting Committee member of the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University, and a Senior Scholar of the now-defunct Peale Family Still Life Painting Project. In 2011 Schweizer was appointed as a founding member of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site’s National Council. 

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