The Shakers Weren’t Minimalists

An exhibition posits that the sect happened upon the ideals of modern design, overlooking the contradictions and vitality of its culture.

PHILADELPHIA — Imagine walking down a dirt pathway towards a bright, clean building in rural upstate New York. The windows are shutterless, neatly spaced rectangles; the roof is softly arched; and the walls are rattling with the screams, shouts, and stomps of dozens of people inside.

You’ve arrived at the Second Meetinghouse of Mount Lebanon, the beating heart of a tiny, celibate, egalitarian, pacifist Christian sect: the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, better known as the Shakers, named for the distinctive ecstatic dances that accompanied joyful song during worship. A society of revolutionaries, when they burst onto the scene of 18th-century America, they were considered profoundly threatening. Today, they are best remembered for crafting stylish chairs. But they sought nothing less than to build heaven on earth.

Left: Shaker community, Mount Lebanon, New York High chair with tape seat (c. 1880–83), birch and webbing; right: installation view of The Shakers: A World in the Making

The Shakers: A World in the Making, a traveling exhibition that debuted at Vitra Design Museum and is currently on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, includes beautiful historic objects from Shaker design history, as well as works of contemporary art inspired by Shakers’ aesthetics and values. A collaboration with the Shaker Museum currently under construction in Chatham, New York, one might assume the exhibition was timed to coincide with The Testament of Ann Lee, the 2025 quasi-musical film about the founding of the Shakers. But apparently, the two projects are unrelated.

Which sets up the question: Why an exhibition about the Shakers at all? And why now? Despite its many striking examples of Shaker art and craft, the show gives no clear direction. For the most part, it retells the standard story of a once 6,000-strong sect, with only three remaining members, that somehow happened upon both ideals of modern design and gender equality (of a sort) long before much of the rest of society caught up. And yet, the very objects on the exhibition floor present a number of problems: How are we meant to square the characterization of Shakers as strict minimalists with rugs and drawings positively bursting with color and ornament? And how do we reconcile the Shakers’ commitment to radical equality with their well-moneyed commercial ventures?