In honor of the Albany Institute of History & Art’s 225th anniversary, rarely seen items from the Institute’s library collections will join prints, drawings, pastels, and watercolors in the exhibition Masterworks: Paper. Manuscripts, letters, architectural plans, photographs, ephemera, silhouettes, and maps spanning three centuries will be featured alongside works by American masters including artists Thomas Cole, Walter Launt Palmer, and Ellsworth Kelly, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, and muralist Lewis W. Rubenstein. Because the world of paper is not just flat, the two-dimensional pieces will be joined by books and other three-dimensional objects such as a nineteenth-century Chinese “Fan of a Thousand Faces.” Masterworks: Paper will raise the curtain on seldom-seen materials that cannot be exhibited very often or for extended periods of time due to their sensitivity to light.
