Sawyer, Alan R. (1919 - 2002)

Alan Sawyer originally trained as a geologist. After serving in the US army during WW2, he studied fine art at the Museum School and completed master’s degrees in art history at both Boston University and Harvard. He taught studio art and art history at Texas State College for Women, and while there became interested in the pre-Columbian art of the Americas. He was founding curator of Primitive Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Between 1952 and 1959 he expanded the museum’s collection of indigenous art, arranging for the purchase of many key works, including the extraordinary Gaffron collection of Peruvian ceramics and textiles. From 1959 to 1971, he served as director of the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. While there he made significant additions to their collection of pre-Columbian textiles and carried out extensive field work in Peru, including aerial surveys and a stratigraphic excavation in the Ica Valley. In 1968 he curated the exhibition, "Mastercraftsmen of Ancient Peru" at the Guggenheim museum in New York. Sawyer’s achievements were recognized with an honorary doctorate from Bates College in 1969. He moved to Canada in 1974, and from 1975 to 1985 he was professor of indigenous American art at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C. Canada. His early training as a geologist and artist influenced his hands-on approach—he understood clay and pottery techniques, and carried out extensive material-based research. This meticulous methodology was evident in his work on the Nathan Cummings collection, published in “Ancient Peruvian Ceramics”, which established Sawyer as a leading expert on Teojate Paracas ceramics. Sawyer was also the first scholar to map out the stylistic transitions between the late phases of Paracas and early phases of Nasca (1961).