News
July 13, 2016Exhibition Offers Rare View of Delicate Paper Collections
The Albany Institute of History & Art continues celebrating its 225th anniversary with the new exhibition, Masterworks: Paper, on view through October 16. This exhibition showcases more than 150 rarely seen items from the Albany Institute’s library and museum collections that span more than three centuries. Sharing in common the medium of paper and close ties to Albany and the Capital Region, the objects in Masterworks: Paper illustrate diverse and eclectic themes, and tell stories that represent the personal and intimate as well as the historical and panoramic.
Much like a scrapbook, Masterworks: Paper is arranged in sixteen thematic sections filled with treasures in various media applied to or made with paper. The exhibition includes printed books and ephemera, watercolors, photographs, engravings, architectural drawings, pastels, maps, manuscripts, and letters and even some three-dimensional objects made of paper. The works on view colorfully illustrate topics ranging from people, places, and politics to water and weather, to fiction, farming, and families.
“We’ve taken some liberties with the definition of ‘masterwork’,” notes curator Diane Shewchuk in explaining how the objects were selected. “We wanted to highlight some of the Albany Institute’s more interesting pieces that are rarely on view, due to their sensitivity to light. Sometimes the subject of the piece is the masterwork, like the Erie Canal or the Delaware and Hudson Company building; sometimes the author or artist is the master; sometimes it’s a combination of both. And sometimes we just wanted to share with you something especially distinctive, such as an 1804 quillwork tea caddy or a poem written by Thomas Cole for his wife Maria.”
“These fragile, organic items are always kept in the dark for preservation purposes, and most are simply masterworks of survival,” adds Sandra Markham, the Institute’s former librarian who lent her expertise and helped curate the show. “But this exhibition beautifully showcases the great depth of the Institute’s collections, and we had a lot of fun putting it together. Where else this summer will you encounter a cross-section of a sheep, an enormous freehand penmanship eagle, a family tree resembling a hydra, or a lock of Red Jacket’s hair mounted on paper by a now-forgotten local poet? I see it as more than an exhibition—it’s an anniversary party!”
Masterworks: Paper includes drawings by the well-loved Albany artists Dorothy Lathrop, Walter Launt Palmer, Edward Lamson Henry, James Eights, and Will Hicok Low, and works by American masters including James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Thomas Hart Benton, Rockwell Kent, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jacob Lawrence. Hudson River School is represented by its masters Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Jasper Cropsey, and William Hart. Regional contemporary art is featured in the exhibition with works by artists such as Richard Callner, Don Nice, Nancy Lawton, Harold Lohner, and Gayle Johnson.
Letters of special interest include a thank-you letter George Washington wrote in 1782 to Albany’s mayor, Abraham Ten Broeck and city officials following his first visit to Albany, and an 1804 letter from Thomas Jefferson to New York State’s Surveyor General, Simeon DeWitt.
Three-dimensional objects include a nineteenth-century Chinese “Fan of a Thousand Faces,” a cut-paper silhouette of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon made c. 1940-50 by Ugo Mochi, and examples of nineteenth-century bandboxes.
A selection of posters, interior sketches and renderings related to the New York Central System and the Delaware and Hudson Railway reflect the Albany Institute’s extensive railroad history collections.
Works from the eighteenth century include portraits of several Native American leaders of the time, including the Seneca chief Sagoyewatha, known as “Red Jacket,” who helped the British during the Revolutionary War; the Mohawk military and political leader Joseph Brant; and four leaders of the Iroquois Alliance who visited Queen Anne’s court in London in 1710 with a contingent of British military leaders to seek military assistance and Christian missionaries.
Each object in Masterworks: Paper tells a multi-layered story of its maker, its subject, its time, and its place. Together these works illustrate the richness of the Albany Institute’s collections, and offer many entry points to explore and discover the works themselves—and to appreciate the medium of paper, so ubiquitous, yet so often taken for granted.
Special guided tours of Masterworks: Paper will be held on Friday, August 5 from 5-8PM and on Thursday, August 18 at 6PM. These tours are free and open to the public. Additional programming may be available this fall. Check www.albanyinstitute.org for more information.
