Don Swanson

For more than four decades, Don Swanson called The Frick Collection in New York City his professional home, rising to become the institution’s Chief of Collections Preservation and Graphic Designer. He retired from The Frick in 2017. Throughout his multi-faceted career at the Frick, Swanson pursued his private passion for painting. Swanson’s paintings are abstract, contemplative and vibrant and about the imagination where the viewer discovers something on the canvas and supplies the narrative. Swanson says his paintings celebrate the “joy of color and surfaces.” He likes to work in “layers of glazes – the finished effect creates a sense of depth and ambiguous space.”