Ten years ago, a Reddit user asked: “What’s your last memory of being picked up by a parent?” The user StatOne recalled scrambling as a four-year-old to keep pace with his family as they briskly climbed an uneven hillside. He was falling behind and frightened of being forgotten in the dark when his father “unexpectedly” turned back. “He picked me up to his shoulder, never broke stride, so smoothly, so lovingly, like the hand of God reaching down,” wrote StatOne.
And then, without warning, that god sets you down, packs you a suitcase and sends you off into the night. The ensuing terror of adulthood begins, and rarely ends for most Americans. In 2023, the US Surgeon General declared an epidemic of loneliness driven by a “fundamental sense of disconnection from others or the world” and fueled by too much technology, too much work, and a dearth of familial, religious, or spiritual fulfillment. Two years later, the prescribed remedy—”learn to love oneself and community”; “cultivate meaning and purpose”—sounds tragically quaint.
A visit to the past may be in order. Conveniently, a sort of time machine opens today in downtown Los Angeles, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth. Actor Frances McDormand and performance artist Suzanne Bocanegra will debut at the gallery’s downtown location a new iteration of CRADLED, a multisensory experience that they first staged in 2024 in collaboration with the Shaker Museum in upstate New York. The experience kicks off tonight and will remain on view through January 4, 2026.
Its official host, Make Hauser & Wirth, an intimate showcase of contemporary and historic craft tradition, has good taste. The Shakers, formally known as the United Society of Shakers, were a religious community founded in 1774 by the prophet Ann Lee and renowned for their self-sufficiency, celibacy, and minimalist aesthetic. The Shakers earned their name from ecstatic, somatic worship: dancing, singing, literally shaking with devotion. It was, in a curious sense, a society of extremes. Shaker design resists excessive ornamentation, prioritizing form, but the artistic impulse will out: furniture makers often added asymmetrical drawer arrangements, for example, for visual texture. Though the sect has largely vanished, their core tenets of humility and utility speak—quietly, of course—through a wealth of surviving crafts. A few of those crafts appear in CRADLED, one being an easy guess.
In the first iteration, an adult-sized cradle, painted a gentle baby blue, sat between McDormand and Bocanegra, each clad in period garb and perched on rocking chairs. The cradle was empty, inviting visitors to interpret it as a gesture toward the imminently departed or newly arrived—or, as the curators suggest, both. More have been placed around the room in LA, though they will not be directly engaged by McDormand and Bocanegra. “The cradle is such a potent piece of furniture,” Bocanegra said.
Sharon Koomler, a curator at the Shaker Museum, added: “You would see [adult-sized cradles] in Shaker infirmaries, primarily. It was an opportunity to be hold somebody who was ill, somebody on the last leg of their earthly journey. I’ll speak to myself: if I’ve ever been particularly angst filled or really not feeling good, a rocking chair or just rocking myself in my own bed helps to soothe. Shakers understood that method of care.”
Installation view, CRADLED at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles, 20 November 2025–4 January 2026. Courtesy Shaker Museum (Chatham NY) and Hauser & Wirth
She and her colleague, Jerry Grant, helped develop the experience with McDormand and Bocanegra. The artists considered every piece of furniture in the Shaker Museum archive that could symbolize mortality: tiny rocking chairs, adult-sized rocking chairs, wheelchairs, and beautiful maple walkers.
“Suzanne—wisely, as a conceptual, visual artist—said concentrating on one object in the room is more powerful,” McDormand said. The two collaborators also borrowed from the museum a few four-tiered wooden hangers that the Shakers used in their communal bedrooms. The hangers are installed on the walls, and blur the boundary between object and artifact. All together, the setting conjures “the ghosts of a community,” according to McDormand.
McDormand and Bocanegra met when McDormand was invited to perform one of Bocanegra’s acclaimed lectures-cum-experimental diary readings. Later, they discovered a mutual appreciation for Shaker material and spiritual culture. “The thing that strikes me over the years about the Shaker theology is that it really is love based,” Grant said. “When Suzanne and Fran first came to us with a concept of sort of looking at the arc of life from cradle to grave. To Shakers, that meant more than just putting someone in a nursing home; it was really a participation of caring.”
Of all the forms of affection we anxiously measure, care may be the easiest to qualify. “As a feminist, ‘love’ was always hard for me because it went along with a lot of weird stuff, like the very high voices in Disney films of the female protagonist, who were falling in love with princes. But care, care is something different—I think that that’s definitely something that we all shared when we were building [CRADLED] together.”
While Bocanegra does not describe herself as an actor, her work engages with female selfhood, much like McDormand’s. The Shakers believed gender equalitarianism was a divine mandate. Accordingly, Shaker women held genuine, not symbolic, institutional authority and, by doctrine, did not marry; the appeal of this utopia is not exactly a mystery.
The first iteration of CRADLED seemed to strike a cord with the women who stopped by. Bocanegra remembers several joining her and McDormand over several days to knit or mend.
“There were people who came back throughout the duration of [the first iteration] because they wanted to come and sit; they understood,” Bocanegra said.
The Shakers practice celibacy, but Angelenos won’t be asked to take vows of sexual abstinence—or asked of much at all, beyond an embrace of community in an age of ambient alienation. Bocanegra and McDormand will be doing the same. They’re credited as “eldresses” in both iterations of CRADLED, but they stressed that this is neither theater nor an “activation,” as Hauser & Wirth advertised it. It’s simply people in a room with no transactional purpose.
Shaker Lemon Pie will be served from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., a sort of ascetic happy hour. Between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., Bocanegra and McDormand will sit and mend, pausing occasionally to rock guests in the cradle. Composer David Lang’s “end‑of‑life lullaby,” adapted from a Shaker spiritual, will play throughout, softening the silence.
“Los Angeles is really vibrant, but it isn’t an easy place to live,” McDormand said, citing January’s wildfires and the intensifying ICE raids. Bocanegra added the erosion of free expression at local universities to the list.
Against this bitter backdrop, Bocanegra reflected, “It might be a good time to consider how we can all care for each other.”
