In 2017, the Guggenheim in Bilbao mounted an Anni Albers exhibition in which the AT&T tapestries were prominent.
The Albers Foundation has had a particularly felicitous relationship with the Solomon Guggenheim Museums in their various locations.
In the mid 1980s, Lee Eastman strategically arranged a dinner to introduce Diane Waldman, then Deputy Director and Senior Curator of the Guggenheim in New York, and Nick Weber; the result was the retrospective exhibition that opened there on March 19, 1988—the centenary of Josef’s birth. The design where the ramps encourage a chronological presentation of an artist’s work were particularly well suited to this show that began with his earliest known drawing, from 1911, and progressed to a glorious, jewel-like group of Homages.
In 1972, when Nick was invited by Peggy Guggenheim to visit her Palazzo Venier dei leoni in Venice, he and his sister Nancy encountered Philip Rylands as they and others were leaving the Palazzo that evening. Philip, for whom it was a first meeting with Peggy, subsequently became Director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection when it became a public institution following Peggy’s death. The friendships continued. In 1994, the PGC housed a show of Josef’s work in glass, organized especially because of the Venetian tradition of blowing colored glass, and in 1999, the PGC put on an Anni Albers exhibition for which they commissioned Gae Aulenti to design the installation, and for which she created special loom-like constructions for displaying Anni’s textiles, and furniture covered with a new edition of one of Anni’s early materials. Aulenti subsequently installed the show for its venues in Paris (the Musée des Arts Décoratifs) and New York (the Jewish Museum) as well, with a sense of detail and patience that remain unforgettable. In 2017, The Solomon Guggenheim in New York showed Josef’s glass and photographs, and a donor to the museum and the Foundation made a significant gift of photographs.
