Communal living, spiritual devotion, and commitment to design and medicine: These tenets were central to the beliefs of the Shakers. But how has this sect influenced contemporary artists?
This question is behind “A World in the Making: The Shakers,” a group exhibition on view at ICA Philadelphia following its debut at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany last summer. The show brings together around 100 historical Shaker-made artifacts with contemporary artworks by seven artists whose work takes inspiration from the ideals of Shaker life. These mostly large-scale works sit among furniture, tools, and ephemera on loan from the Shaker Museum in Chatham, New York.
The exhibition is part of a growing contemporary interest in the religious movement, on the heels of the blockbuster musical drama The Testament of Ann Lee, starring Amanda Seyfried. Meanwhile, Hauser & Wirth’s design gallery Make recently partnered with the Shaker Museum to host the exhibition “CRADLED,” featuring a performance inspired by the Shakers starring actress Frances McDormand and artist Suzanne Bocanegra. Curator of “A World in the Making,” Hallie Ringle, noted that the show was based on themes in contemporary art, too: “There is something to pay attention to about reckoning our values and systems,” she said. “Artists now are thinking about what else is out there in terms of other living forms.”
History of the Shaker movement
The Shakers established the norms of their particular communal living in 1774, when they expanded to the U.S. with a small group led by the matriarchal figure Mother Ann Lee. The group was initiated in the United Kingdom in the middle of the 18th century. Formed by a group of rebels in the Quakers, another Christian sect, these members united in their commitment to celibacy, labor, and gestural dance rituals.
The strictly celibate clan soon spread from upstate New York across New England where they grew into over 20 communities through recruited converts. Their acumen in woodworking and medicine, as well as trading of these products, made the otherwise separatist group’s livelihood possible. In particular, they were known for their furniture. Besides cementing financial sustainability through trade, the believers saw these products as a way to communicate their religion to the outside world, expressing the physical outcomes of their spirituality.
Across two floors, the show examines the Shakers’ notions of devotion, corporality, isolation, labor, and community. Many of the historical subjects on display were fundamental for the devotees of the Shaker sect (formally called United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing). Unlike many other Christians, their worship centered on connecting with God through bodily exercise, whether that took the form of ecstatic dance or creating design objects. Some of these minimalist furniture pieces are highly sought after by collectors who have paid tens of thousands of dollars at auction for them.
Contemporary artists inspired by Shaker furniture
Part of the Shaker ethos was also to live and make their tools communally. This collective production method is critical in Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s two embroidered and printed sateen banners (both 2025–26). For these works, she collaborated with a local embroiderer (Philadelphia’s only remaining silk-producing factory) and personally spent over 100 hours weaving with a group of artisans. Each banner stretches vertically (around 160 inches up the wall) and presents abstracted interpretations of the handwritten journal of Rebecca Cox Jackson, who ran the only Black-led Shakers community, in Philadelphia.
“I’ve always been interested in how people choose to believe or not believe in ideas and how rebellions occur within a religious group,” Rasheed explained. Jackson’s story particularly intrigued her: a rebellious Black woman “motivated to create a movement out of the fringes of another community.” The New York– and Los Angeles–based artist, therefore, decided to turn Jackson’s only surviving journal into patterns as part of “searching for a meaning in the tenor of her handwriting.” It was a transformative experience: “Studying the Shakers revived a deep interest in thinking about how artists work individually but also the importance of exploring the transference that occurs through collaboration,” she said.
How contemporary artists are inspired by Shaker culture
Besides the wooden furniture that the Shakers are known for, the group also produced clothing, musical instruments, woven baskets, and medicine. Brooklyn-based artist Finnegan Shannon commented on the Shakers’ lesser-known history with pharmaceutical trade with the installation I Want to Believe (2025), a quintet of blue fabric banners decorated with advertorial language that Shannon pulled from pain relief medications. The words emblazoned here are in a typeface the artist commonly uses in their two- or three-dimensional work. Expressions such as “Provides Optimal Support” or “Reduces Pain” create a poetic meditation on bodily function, especially presented adjacent to numerous Shaker medication and aid tools.
Elsewhere, Chris Liljenberg Halstrøm’s linen and cotton woven painting Meetinghouse (2025) refers to the believers’ communal worship houses, famously devoid of any decoration. The abstract tapestry anchors an installation entitled My Work Station / My Prayer Room (2025) that includes the artist’s wooden worktable finished with various tools and a cotton kneeling chair. The Scandinavian artist and furniture maker lifts the curtain on her long hours with thread by transporting her laborious process into the gallery. “The work becoming a prayer itself resonates with me,” said Halstrøm, “because as artists, we make things to respond to the world and the process is important.”
Other artists are inspired by the Shakers’ use of movement as a pathway to spirituality. POWER – Every Movement is Sacred (2025)—the nine-minute video documentation of Reggie Wilson’s dance piece POWER, developed at Hancock Shaker Village in 2021—embodies this thematic parallel. Rigorous gestures of devotion and reverie are reflected in the dancers’ movements, which take cues from the religion’s shaking rituals and Black churches. “Intimacy can exist without sexuality, and although Reggie’s work doesn’t show any dancer touching, they have a strong bond,” said Ringle.
Hartt shot his eight-minute video, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Tree of Light) (2025), in Holy Mount, a historic ceremonial site in Massachusetts, inspired by the Shaker tradition of “gift drawings.” Painted by the group’s women during the early 19th-century manifestation period, these energetic illustrations of nature and repeating patterns depict transcendence. They also show members’ individuality in an otherwise extremely collective community. In Hartt’s work, he searches for the native fauna that prompted the visions women saw or imagined in their drawings through moving sequences of plants and trees. Here, the Philadelphia-based artist’s experimental lens lends itself to surprising colorations and stills of nature, meditating on value and transcendence. The show pairs the video with three of these historical gift drawings, materializing the parallel Hartt builds between immediacy and reverie, both seen in abundance in nature.
Overall, the show stands out as a remarkable sign of how significant the Shakers still are today. The contemporary art on view solidifies the 300-year-old belief system’s archaic and timeless elements. It reminds us of the enduring nature of basic human characteristics, whether that’s hard work, solidarity, or delusion.
