Something about the Shakers keeps pulling me back for another look. Is it the spare, linear aesthetic, prized equally by modernists and traditionalists? Is it their perplexing identity as “Celibate, Christian, Communists” (words that appear, starkly, side-by-side on the communal monument in Enfield, Conn.) or a sense that the Shakers embody a perplexing mix of Puritanism, Transcendentalism and the go-getter, outward-bound American spirit?
There is nothing in the realm of Americana quite like the Shakers, both in substance and in the ways we come to know them. The closer we look, the more we know, the more the Shakers seem like a quirky, not-so-distant relative †at once different, but so familiar that something would be lost in not knowing them; something inspiring and reaffirming of the American story.
With “Inspired Innovations: A Celebration of Shaker Ingenuity,” author and collector M. Stephen Miller has directed, stage-managed and choreographed a tribute and excursion into all things Shaker that represents a high water mark in Shaker scholarship, a milestone in the art of collecting, a triumph of curatorship and a bold departure for New Britain Museum of American Art where this performance remains on view until April 11. For Miller, this is the culmination of a journey that began with a casual visit to Hancock Shaker Village in 1977 (the exhibition will be remounted there during that museum’s 2011 operating season). It is a journey of remarkable observational intensity, passion and vision †the indispensable element in any successful museum production.
Miller, a retired periodontist whose office was just down the street from the New Britain Museum, assembled a project team that included a former nurse, a private detective, a newspaper publisher, an FBI agent, a rock musician and several well-known Shaker scholars, including Jerry Grant, Scott Swank and Christian Goodwillie. One of the advantages of being a serious collector is that you have good reasons to get to know everyone, and everyone †dealers and museums, especially †wants to know you.
The project and its approach mirror one another, interweaving private (mostly Miller’s own) and institutional collections, professional and amateur scholars and a communal spirit that put the vision first †a vision that honors more than a half-century of work by the many hands who have sorted through the evidence, preserved treasures, nurtured the development of village restorations and, as the dedication reads, “striven to tell the Shakers’ story truthfully and fairly.”
Why “truthfully and fairly?” Celibate, Christian, communists †especially religious sects founded and directed primarily by women †need all the friends they can get. Not to pity. One often senses with Shaker devotees the same kind of emotional engagement and intensity one might associate with Robert Ballard’s recovery of the Titanic †that there is something both epic and tragic at stake that speaks volumes to our aspirations as a people. Like veterans of a great military, technological or spiritual conflict, the Shakers have left us with a touchstone that warrants special care, reflection and love.
The spirits must be dancing for this one because “Inspired Innovations” is one of the most visually stimulating and intellectually engaging exhibitions in memory. Shifting the focus from the art of Shaker design (of which this exhibition has plenty) to the breadth of Shaker innovation was an “inspired” choice †the most compelling excursion into the “high/low” dialectic since the late Kirk Varnadoe’s legendary “High And Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” (Museum of Modern Art, 1990). Varnadoe won a McArthur “Genius” Fellowship. “Inspired Innovations” is no less noteworthy, and the accompanying book (University of New England Press) and installation are a treat that use digital-age design and technology and cascades of color in ways not possible nor likely back then.
This is no museological sidebar. Collectors, life-learners, students, culture vultures and civic leaders crave experiences that nail the sweet spot between “art for art’s sake” and a great story well told. More commonly, we have this thing going on that puts art in one box and history in another, scholarship in one box and popular culture in another. “Inspired Innovations” is a mashup that ought to be required viewing for art curators who still think it is all about name brands and high art on pedestals and history museum curators who do not get the aesthetic power of great objects or who think it is all about contrived storylines. “Inspired Innovations” has a contrived storyline. But it also has literally hundreds of artistically arranged, carefully chosen objects †large, small, artistic and ephemeral; even archival documents shine in this context †all set against Shaker-colored backgrounds that radiate life. One almost forgets that this is not primarily an art show, the stuff is presented with such pizzazz.
The prize in the Cracker Jack box is one very basic big idea: that scale of operations, economics, timing, kindliness toward one another and a relentless determination to, as the authors put it, “raise money so they might live according to their nontraditional way of life” made the Shakers an incubator of innovation and technology. One hears that the Shakers invented the circular saw and the clothes pin †both claims, the authors verify, are untrue. We know that their furniture was different and that they dressed funny, but this exhibition buries the visitor happily in evidence that those little factoids are just the tip of an iceberg and it goes way deeper. We see context and circumstances behind dozens of innovations, not a few of which had a profound and lasting influence within and beyond Shaker communities.
The exhibition arranges its evidence according to social and economic contexts (health care, sanitation, living arrangements, institutional scale living and adaptation to the declining population of Shaker men) and according to such conventional designations as furniture, cooperage, textiles and woodenwares. Whatever the thematic approach, we see lots of stuff rarely if ever featured in the Shaker literature. The material is eclectic, covering a bit of the Eighteenth Century, the whole of the Nineteenth and a joyful finale in the early Twentieth as Shakers adapted to decline by making and marketing poplarware souvenirs, stereo viewers, fur gloves, cloaks and colorful knit sweaters that became Ivy League prep fashion in “Dartmouth green” and “Harvard crimson.”
The Shakers invented the packaged garden seed industry and dominated it nationally until after the Civil War. What started as an internal economy, managing seed use for their large-scale “domestic” gardens, became the one industry developed at all the Shaker communities. Packaged garden seeds were a critical element in establishing the Shaker “brand,” their most profitable export enterprise and a vehicle for honing their expertise at marketing, packaging and distribution. One might think of the Shakers’ pious, celibate, ascetic and confessional way of life contradicting a modern, market-oriented, capitalistic approach to business. But why? Communism †the sharing of property †in no way assumes or implies an indifference to profit-making. Indeed, a strong capitalistic approach to business enabled the Shakers to live and share in the bounty as they chose. Seeds were the rock and foundation of their export economy.
We learn that health and sanitation was an important driver in Shaker innovation †that a fixation on cleanliness, neatness and order, originating in their spiritual ideology, ultimately affected their health and well-being (Shaker life expectancy was the highest in Nineteenth Century America). The concept of order was a metaphor for straightness in Shaker life and was reflected in the way buildings and paths in villages were laid out and the strict rectolinearity of their furniture.
Not surprisingly, the Shakers developed a profusion of cleaning devices †carpet beaters, brooms, ways of making brooms. Over and over again this context of self-reliance, large-scale living and peculiar needs, functions and values led to the development of new tools, styles and technologies. Some were emulated throughout the many Shaker communities, a few found mass markets in the world beyond, while others were oddball novelties that worked for a while before fizzling out. More than a few, like the Shakers’ industrial-scale, water-powered washing machines (the 1876 version won a bronze medal at the Centennial Exhibition), were never produced in abundance and are thus remarkable rarities.
Longevity produced a challenge that spawned another array of innovations as aging Shakers from the founding generation required elder care. Caring for their aging population led to the invention of curious apparatuses †wheelchairs, bedsteads with cam-adjustable head and foot boards, walkers and an electrostatic chair to treat rheumatism. As the authors note, “Although the Shakers did not create this technology, it is interesting to see what they did with it.”
The Shakers’ longevity was not unnoticed by the world’s people. Although it was largely a result of prevention and good habits, innovative herbal medicines improved their health and led to another community industry, second only to seed production in profitability. Herbs, herb presses, Shaker extracts and a partnership with Dr Andrew Judson White, whose Shaker extracts (laxatives) became largest selling medicine in the world, sustained Shaker independence.
The Shakers dabbled in other marketable products, including a spurious foray marketing a Shaker hair restorer †”gray hair may be honorable,” the broadsides noted, “but the natural color is preferable.” The quantity and arrangement of smalls gives this exhibition a lot of its visual punch. The stuff is amazing and when juxtaposed with advertising and special function tools designed to package the products, there is a sense of crossing into another time zone and environment that is delightful.
The Shakers had to eat, and since Shaker communities were essentially large-scale communal farms, their innovations naturally extended into horticulture and food processing and packaging. They canned corn, packed applesauce in custom-designed wooden tubs, developed and patented tools for processing apples and foodstuffs and, while apparently spurning the use of wines and spirits, sold and marketed wine grapes and bottled “Shaker Wine.”
In 1900, with their numbers in decline and their future unsure, Shaker O.C. Hampton of Union Village, Ohio, drafted a broadside extolling Shaker values and welcoming new recruits. “By a long experience of more than a century,” s/he observed, “we have proven &†that this faith and doctrine and practical life will yield the peaceable fruits of righteousness &†and raise us out of all fear and apprehension of the future, by furnishing us with a perfect salvation from sin in the present. This is a Church wherein the members can absolutely live without sin and in perfect peace with God and their conscience. Is this not a heaven on earth here and now? We hereby invite all who are weary and sick of the sins and the shams, the violence and oppression and the injustice, lust and cruelty with which the world is reeking, to give us a call and see if we cannot do them good not only now but for all time and all eternity.”
The Shakers may be a closed chapter in American history, but so long as the gift of seeing is ours as strongly as it was theirs, the Shakers and their art, innovation and ideas will have eternal life.
The New Britain Museum of American Art is at 56 Lexington Street. For information, 860-229-0257 or www.nbmaa.org .
