Matt W.
Yelp
I confess to a great fondness for the mid- to small-sized regional museum, of which the Albany Institute of History and Art is a fine example. One is rarely bothered by crowds of people, nor with the feeling of urgency that one must roam through a vast collection on a limited schedule in order to "see" everything. (I once had four hours to see the Louvre, at least an hour of which was consumed with paralytic decision-making: do I wait the hour to wade into the front of the crowd to see the Mona Lisa? Or spend the entire time on a single room literally packed ceiling to floor with interesting things I've never even heard of? When there are a few hundred more rooms? Ugh.)
So at the Albany Institute there isn't even a big enough collection to call it "eclectic". The museum has an old collection, dating to the late 18th century, one of the oldest in the country, but it was never the recipient of significant largesse from a major donor or private collector so much as getting the interesting bits out of people's attics instead of their drawing rooms. Two-thirds of the exhibit space now is given over to short-term exhibitions, and the remaining divided without significant coherence among two Egyptology rooms, two small rooms of early Albany artifacts, two rooms of Hudson River landscapes, and a grand staircase that doubles as a 19th century American sculpture gallery. (This latter creeps me out: basically just one sculptor and his acolytes, who had a predilection for depicting young female nudes with questionable 19th century titles such as 'Indian Captive'.) The Albany artifacts are interesting if a little bit of a hodge podge, with Dutch furniture and early English portraiture from colonial days, then sort of skipping around a bit into the early 19th century. The Hudson River collection is excellent, without a major work or a major artist represented but with enough examples of fine second-tier work that it's an excellent little survey of the school. The Egyptian stuff - including the famous SCARY mummies -- is utterly without surrounding context, and while it has its appeal (it's SCARY!) it veers dangerously close to a curiosity.
The two rotating exhibits at the time of our visit were one on Quilts and Coverlets, that featured a lot of lovely work hanging in the larger third floor exhibit space, but without what I'd call a compelling guided narrative to take one through a history or sense of space. All quilts, no supplemental material (pictures or stories of the creators, displays of materials, explanation of the process, etc. -- just the stuff.) The other one taking up nearly all the second floor was a puzzling exhibit on Baseball. With the Hall of Fame just an hour and a half away, the only part of this exhibit that had any unique appeal was the one room dedicated to baseball in the Capital Region, which was in itself a bit episodic, showing the different eras of minor league baseball and a nice little corner on Black / Negro League baseball. But it also missed a few important bits of curation that would have knitted it all together -- timelines, maps, sidebar stories of the famous and not so famous. As a baseball fan, I was somewhat surprisingly bored by the exhibit as a whole - what is the exact point?
The museum also needs some thought put into it as far as signage and visitor flow, given the hodge podge and disparate exhibit spaces/collections spread over several generations of construction.
The "Children's Gallery" is a small play room, that had only one small part tied into the exhibits -- a small Egypt-inspired corner where you can rub your own hieroglyphic and sit in a faux Pharaohnic throne. It had some amusement value for the kids for about 20 minutes - one of them spent the whole time doing plastic patterns on the light table.
The shop is above average, which sections heavily tied into the Baseball exhibit at present but with a nice collection of local history books and the more gift-y type stuff you expect from Art museum shops. There was a sufficient critical mass of children's books and toys. The shop itself, while tucked away on the second floor, does not require admission so as a mid-sized gift shop it may be worth a separate trip if you're looking for something for Aunt Millie's birthday. Staff were helpful (perhaps excessively so; we had some difficulty browsing in peace) and knowledgeable about the museum.
There's no snack / food store, and the parking in the lot in back is literally about 20 spaces, so you're at the mercy of the Albany street parking gods.
All in all - there's stuff of interest (I can always find something cool at places like this) but I wouldn't call this a destination if you're from out of town. Go based on the appeal of the rotating exhibits to your interests.
