“To a man or woman not thoroughly and earnestly in love with an ascetic life and deeply disgusted with the world, Shakerism would be unendurable.” So wrote the Prussian-born journalist Charles Nordhoff in The Communistic Societies of The United States (1875), a field report on utopian settlements that were flourishing across the country. He’d toured quite a few of these fragile alternative outposts, each one an exception meant to disprove the rule of American capitalism.
The Shaker village at Mount Lebanon, New York, made an especially strong impression on him. Prosperous, productive, and neat as a pin, it was also unnervingly quiet. Nordhoff initially attributed this to the fact that a funeral was to be held on the morning of his arrival. Only gradually did he realise that it was always so tranquil. “An eternal Sabbath stillness” prevailed, he wrote. Instead of typical American hustle and bustle, nothing but silent Sundays, forever and ever.
As it turned out, Nordhoff had witnessed the beginning of the Shakers’ end. From a peak membership of about 6,000 souls just prior to the civil war, their ranks dwindled dramatically over the succeeding century. The last of New Lebanon’s Shakers departed the village in 1947, by which time, as one of them told the New Yorker magazine, most of their visitors were antique collectors. Their considered and concise furniture was, in fact, implicated in their decline. As their handcrafted goods were outcompeted by machine-made commodities, they went into other businesses to get by, including patent medicines. Desperate and disaffected people who had once been attracted to the Shaker way of life — and its economic security — increasingly sought out factory jobs instead. Famously (and infamously) celibate, the community had no way to reproduce itself when converts stopped coming.
Today there are only two Shakers left, both living at Sabbathday Lake in Maine. The former spiritual leader of that community, Sister Mildred Barker, once remarked, “I don’t want to be remembered as a chair,” and that admonition hovers over a new exhibition The Shakers: A World in the Making at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany. The project is organised in partnership with the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, which will subsequently host the exhibition, and the Wüstenrot Stiftung, a foundation in Germany devoted to the preservation of modern cultural heritage. It is the first major exhibition on the subject to be staged on this side of the Atlantic since the Barbican Centre’s The Art of Craftsmanship, in 1998.
The show does, of course, include some beautiful chairs, but the emphasis is on less tangible concerns. Leading design studio Formafantasma, who created the scenography, say that they see in the Shakers “a clear example where belief, behaviour, and form are completely intertwined. Every object — from a chair to a woven textile — embodies an ethical system.” This holistic view is shared by the curators, who invite us not just to encounter the Shakers’ objects, but also their way of life. As the Vitra Design Museum curator Mea Hoffman puts it, the intention is “to see them as a foil for our current times, exploring what insights and provocations they might offer us today”.
Despite the Shakers’ cult of simplicity, that is a complicated proposition. In some ways they were strikingly ahead of their times — for starters, they were virtually the only 19th-century Americans to uphold the principle of gender equality. Their prohibition against marital and sexual relations was, in part, a means of ensuring female autonomy and circumventing the mortal dangers of pregnancy. (The founder of the movement, Mother Ann Lee, had lost four children in their infancy.) It comes as no surprise that as the Shakers declined, women were much more likely to keep the faith, making up fully 72 per cent of the “brethren” by 1900. They were enlightened with regard to race, too. Shaker villages occasionally offered refuge to escaped enslaved people. In 1859, a charismatic former seamstress named Rebecca Cox Jackson formed a community in Philadelphia, ministering mostly to Black women. It was the only Shaker group in an urban setting.
Though it’s slightly more of a stretch, the Shakers can also be seen as environmentalist forerunners. They did sell their wares to outsiders, but otherwise tried not to depend on “the world” — their term for the sin-soaked society that surrounded them on all sides — instead developing viable circular economies. Suspicious of superfluity, thrifty to the point of fanaticism, they could be considered the original eco-separatists. At the same time, Nordhoff was quite right to detect among them a “disgust” with the world. Like a lot of people nowadays, they believed that the apocalypse was coming — but they positively welcomed it, anticipating a blessed afterlife to come. It is impossible to understand the Shakers without keeping doomsday constantly in mind, for that is what they did. Their immaculately kept villages were, quite literally, grounds prepared for the Kingdom of God.
The Shakers’ beliefs led them to adopt an extraordinarily rigorous set of standards. Their communities may have been Sabbath-quiet, but they were also manufacturing enterprises, with rigidly enforced schedules and codes of behaviour. Individualism, that most American of values, was in every way discouraged. Many who tried to live among the Shakers eventually abandoned them; as one apostate commented in 1812, “Your gospel seems like a tunnel; the farther I travel in, the narrower it grows.”
Formafantasma’s exhibition design for A World in the Making perfectly captures this complex combination of humanity and austerity. The galleries are outfitted entirely in timber and textile, as if a Shaker village had been abstracted and brought indoors. Against this backdrop are presented a wealth of modest but exquisite historic artefacts: baskets, bonnets, boxes, and brooms; garments and visionary “gift drawings”; ingenious contrivances including a miniature steam engine. (Contrary to what one might think, the Shakers were early adopters of new technologies, including electricity, the telephone and automobiles.) The majority of the items are on loan from the Shaker Museum in Chatham, New York, which stewards the Mount Lebanon historic site and is developing a new four-floor facility with Annabelle Selldorf Architects.
The Shakers have long fascinated artists, Isamu Noguchi and Martha Graham, Ellsworth Kelly, and Martin Puryear among them. The new exhibition extends that tradition with seven contemporary commissions, which collectively evoke the Shakers’ current relevance and otherworldly strangeness. A centrepiece is Amie Cunat’s large-scale installation “2nd Meetinghouse”, modelled on a space at Sabbathday Lake. It is executed in cardboard and washi paper tape in a vibrant blue palette materialising Heaven on Earth. (The installation is adapted from a previous incarnation made in 2018, in response to the upheaval of Donald Trump’s first term as US president. He’s back, and so is this dream of refuge.) Danish textile artist Chris Liljenberg Halstrøm’s monumental embroidery piece, also entitled “Meetinghouse”, is executed in the white and blue palette often seen in those places of gathering and worship. It includes 131,703 stitches (they counted), each representing, in the artist’s words, “an injustice, a joy, a sorrow. A wordless prayer.”
Perhaps the most resonant contemporary work in the exhibition is a prototype willow coffin by Christien Meindertsma, woven using Dutch basketry techniques. She harvested the willow from a four-year-old tree in the Netherlands, anticipating its rapid regrowth. The casket is biodegradable, serving not only as a memorial but also a lively metaphor for acceptance of the natural lifecycle. Meditating on this humble object, we may reflect that while the Shakers’ end is imminent, their intelligence and diligence remain inspiring. Learning from them, ironically, may help put the end of days just that little bit further off.
To September 28, design-museum.de
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