Alan R. Sawyer (1919-2002) was an art historian, curator, museum director, collector, professor, author, and consultant specialising in pre-Columbian and Northwest Coast art. He was born in 1919 in Wakefield, Massachusetts, and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942. In 1946 he married his childhood friend Erika Heininger Sawyer (1922-2012) and together they had five children (Dana, Diane, Brian, Lynn, and Carol). Alan and Erika were avid collectors, and their collection of pre-Columbian and Northwest Coast pieces was often consulted by researchers and exhibited across Canada and the US.

Sawyer received an undergraduate degree in geology from Bates College in 1941 before studying at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1946-1948 and earning his MA in Art History from Harvard in 1949. That same year, Sawyer became an instructor for the art department at the Texas State College for Women. He was employed as the assistant to the Curator of Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952, and in 1956 was promoted to Curator of Primitive Art. While at the Art Institute of Chicago, he also worked as director of the Park Forest Art Center and taught courses at University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame. From 1959 to 1971, Sawyer served as the Director of the Textile Museum in Washington, DC. He joined the faculty at the University of British Columbia in 1974, where he was a professor of art history until his retirement in 1984—when he was named Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts.

In addition to his teaching and writing activities, Sawyer traveled to South America to conduct field work and acted as an expert lecturer on study and leisure tours in Peru. As part of his research into Northwest Coast art and artifacts, he traveled to First Nation communities and assisted North American and European museums with determining artifacts’ provenance. He was the author of several works including Ancient Peruvian Ceramics : the Nathan Cummings Collection (1966) which was published through the Metropolitan Museum, and Mastercraftsmen of Ancient Peru (1968) that accompanied an exhibit at the Guggenheim which he curated. In 1969, Sawyer was awarded an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Bates College.