Richard P. Townsend
President, Townsend Art Advisory LLC
Richard P. Townsend—as a veteran museum director, curator and art historian—has guided the acquisition of major works of art for over thirty years. His experience ranges from old master and 19th-century paintings and drawings to Modern and contemporary art, architecture and design. He has advised public and private collections around the country.
Townsend has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Michigan Avenue Magazine and its Modern Luxury Men’s Book and has made appearances on WNYC’s NYC-Arts with Philippe de Montebello and CBS Sunday Morning with Martha Teichner, among other broadcast media outlets.
Townsend has served as the director or a senior official at art museums around the country from New York and Miami to Los Angeles and Chicago, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; the Museum of Biblical Art, New York and the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Chicago. He has also served as a consulting curator to the American Federation of Arts in New York City and The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and for almost a decade was the Ruth G. Hardman Curator of European and American Art at The Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. He has curated and organized exhibitions such as Picasso and the Progressive Proof: Linocut Prints from a Private Collection (2023-2026); Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral (2015); Siqueiros: Landscape Painter (2010); Prairie Skyscraper: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower (2005); Out of Oklahoma: Contemporary Artists from Ruscha to Andoe (2007); Tanzio da Varallo: Realismo, fervore e contemplazione in un pittore del seicento (2000) and exhibitions focusing on Caravaggio, Robert Indiana, Thomas Moran, Dennis Oppenheim, Yinka Shonibare, and J.M.W. Turner. He has published extensively, including in leading scholarly journals such as Master Drawings, The Burlington Magazine and APOLLO. Townsend received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and earned his Master’s in Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He has served as an adjunct professor of art history at the University of Tulsa. Townsend is also certified in the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice.