How Shaker Design Crafts Visions of Heaven on Earth

Just as the new movie The Testament of Ann Lee brings the Shakers back into the public eye, an exhibition at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art celebrates the movement’s lasting contributions to art and design. “The Shakers: A World in the Making” is a collaboration between the ICA, Vitra Design Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Shaker Museum that brings historic Shaker objects into dialogue with contemporary art, including works newly commissioned for the show.

A religious sect founded in the late 18th century by an Englishwoman named Ann Lee, the Shakers emigrated to the United States and established communities dedicated to both shared living and celibacy. The latter would hardly seem conducive to an expanding influence, but the Shakers managed to gather over 4,000 members (some estimates have it as high as 6,000) at their peak in the 19th century. Their lives of devotion involved crafting a vision of heaven on earth through exquisitely made everyday objects: brooms, chairs, and oval boxes that radiate a quiet perfection.

This isn’t the first time Shaker objects have caught the art world’s eye. They were being claimed for Modernism as early as the 1930s, with Mother Ann’s mantra that “every force evolves a form” resonating with modernists’ appeals for form to follow function. Another wave of attention in the 1980s, including a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, solidified their place in American design history. But the show at the ICA is less about Shaker things (though there are plenty on view) and more about their values—including craft, patience, and care—that seem in short supply these days.

The show sets aside some of the Shaker principles less amenable to our contemporary lives, including the celibacy, the gender segregation, and the intense and ecstatic visions that make watching The Testament of Ann Lee such a thrilling ride, and instead privileges the movement’s more appeasing aspects. Amie Cunat’s blue cardboard 2nd Meetinghouse (2025) offers a contemplative space, disrupted by her inversion of interior and exterior elements—a heating stove on the outside, window casing and siding within—and asks the visitor to reflect on inclusivity and access. Dutch artist Christien Meindertsma draws on Shaker basket-making techniques to prototype willow burial vessels, a sustainable and regenerative practice that reflects the Shakers’ commitment to accompanying their members from cradle to grave.

The Shakers are often referred to as utopian, a term which means literally “no-place.” But they were deeply embedded in place, relying on local materials, farming practices, and even commercial markets to sustain themselves. They were, moreover, distinctly American, in all the complicated ways the term implies. They were founded by immigrants who claimed territory in what was then the expanding West, they drew from Indigenous philosophies and craft including basket-making techniques gleaned from their Wabanaki neighbors, and they were known to discriminate despite claims of racial equality.

While the exhibition works to internationalize their influence, the strongest comment on the Shakers’ complex legacy comes from those engaged with local heritage. Philadelphia was, notably, home to the only urban, Black-led Shaker community, founded by an African American woman named Rebecca Cox Jackson. Jackson inspired two of the contemporary artists in the show. A recording of Reggie Wilson’s Power, first performed in 2022, sets Black worship traditions to modern choreography. The dancers’ bodies inhabit the repetitive gestures and systemic patterns that we know from period diagrams of Shaker dance. To reconstruct not the inert objects but the movement of the Shakers brings us beyond the cool fixity of forms and closer to the animating force of what they were doing.

Jackson’s diaries were also fodder for Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s deliberately cryptic embroidery. Copying glyphs found within Jackson’s writing, Rasheed’s work acknowledges all that doesn’t translate from past to present and the inherent illegibility of a community’s quest for divine vision. The lmeticulously stitched looping forms in “And at the time I was told to gather home … the time had come for me to gather home” (Rebecca Cox Jackson, 237 (2025) lead us not to heaven but back to our stubbornly earthbound selves. “There is no dirt in heaven” goes another Shaker motto, but it’s filthy down here. While the simplicity of a perfectly made broom may seem little match for the problems we face, there is solace in recognizing those who are willing to labor in pursuit of a better world.