Jennifer Krasinski
Visited by heavenly visions, Shaker women made “gift” drawings that functioned as instruments of spiritual inspiration.
Anything but Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic, installation view. Courtesy American Folk Art Museum.
Anything but Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic, organized by Hancock Shaker Village and coordinated by Emelie Gevalt with Austin Losada, American Folk Art Museum, 2 Lincoln Square, New York City, through January 26, 2025
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Two hundred fifty years ago, in Niskayuna, New York, a penniless, uneducated textile worker by the name of Ann Lee founded Shakerism, a radical proposal for how to lead a right, rich spiritual life. Membership to the community replaced the ties of nuclear family, an arrangement that set everyone in equal relation, each a brother or sister to the other. “Shaker” came from “Shaking Quaker,” a nod to the ecstatic full-body eruptions—near-feral dances—some members experienced during their meetings. Their community was a “working heaven on earth,” a model of utopian living in which creative expression was not ancillary to faith but rather a form of worship. One worked knowing there was goodness, and God-ness, in labor. Having observed the Shakers in 1845, none other than Friedrich Engels commented, “They are happy and cheerful among themselves, there is no discord; on the contrary, friendship and love rule throughout their abode.” Three years later, he and Karl Marx would publish The Communist Manifesto.
Anything but Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic, installation view. Courtesy American Folk Art Museum. Pictured, center left: Polly Jane Reed, A Present from Mother Lucy to Eliza Ann Taylor, 1849. Center right: Polly Jane Reed, A Type of Mother Hannah’s Pocket Handkerchief, 1851.
Anything but Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic, a humble marvel of an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum, focuses on these lesser-known Shaker productions, of which there are only two hundred extant; twenty-five are on display here. The practice of “gift” drawings more or less coincided with the Shakers’ “Era of Manifestations”—or “Mother Ann’s Work”—a revival that thumped between 1837 and 1850. At that time, the faith flourished, boasting the largest membership in its history, with communities blossoming as far west as Indiana and Kentucky. The Shakers’ earthly labors were also being rewarded and recognized, the group’s reputation for superior woodworking and singular designs growing beyond their local reach.
Anything but Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic, installation view. Courtesy American Folk Art Museum. Pictured, center, on platform: Candlestand, ca. 1840. Background, on wall: Untitled gelatin silver prints by William F. Winter.
The first room of Anything but Simple features select furniture and objects, immaculately conceived and crafted, epitomizing the Shakers’ sensible sensibility. (The remaining galleries are devoted to the drawings.) There are no devils in the details, so to speak; rather, such pieces testify to their makers’ rapt attention to the material world and their felt purpose to convey, rather than create, beauty. Among the things on view is a seed carrier made of butternut and pine with a hickory handle, bent by steam to arc over the box in a line so elegant it calls to mind the sky arcing over a landscape. The three legs of a nearby candlestand carved in cherry wood look like snakes gliding down from the table’s center to rejoin the ground. Striking black-and-white photographs by William F. Winter capture Shakers at work as well as their meticulous interiors—spare spaces that support focus on spiritual matters.
Polly Collins, A Gift from Mother Ann to the Elders at the North Family, 1854. Ink and watercolor on paper, 26 3/4 × 19 3/16 inches. Courtesy Andrews Collection, Hancock Shaker Village.
The Shakers largely sold their goods—such as their famed chairs, cabinets, clocks, and more—to “outsiders” in order to fund their communities. Designs had to be vetted and approved by the Central Ministry in Mount Lebanon, New York, before any member began their work. The drawings, however, were never for sale nor subject to any kind of quality control or dictum. All were made by women who called themselves “instruments” to more precisely define their calling in community. Brightly hued and comparatively whimsical, their “gifts” were only produced when their hand was moved by a heavenly vision or a visitation. The drawings are often accompanied by stories of how the picture came to be; some are signed. They were not treated as artworks, per se, never hung on the walls or put on display by the Shakers themselves. As “gifts,” they were passed around in meetings to inspire, fortify, or instruct fellow faithfuls. As example: in 1854, Polly Collins, one of the Shakers whose work is featured in the show, claimed to have received a message from Mother Ann, who had died in 1784. Collins transcribed her words at the top of her drawing, A Gift from Mother Ann to the Elders at the North Family (1854):
This pretty gift I send to you,
That you at times may sit & view,
This emblem of a higher sphere,
And bring your feelings to it near.
Polly Collins, The Gospel Union, Fruit-Bearing Tree, 1855. Ink and watercolor on paper, 31 3/16 × 25 7/8 inches. Courtesy Andrews Collection, Hancock Shaker Village.
No two drawings are alike, although they all share imagery, motifs, themes. Collins’s The Gospel Union, Fruit-Bearing Tree (1855), prompted by a visitation from Elder Brother Joseph Wicker, presents a space for contemplation: two benches inked in blue lines sit on either side of the tree, each beneath a lush arbor entwined with vines. “I received a draft of a beautiful Tree pencil’d on a large sheet of white paper bearing ripe fruit,” Hannah Cohoon penned in a delicate hand beneath her watercolor, The Tree of Life (1854), its subject also received from Mother Ann. “I saw it plainly; it looked very singular and curious to me. I have since learned that this tree grows in the Spirit Land.” Cohoon’s is perhaps one of the best known of all the “gift” drawings, a jubilant symbol of abundance, its slim brown trunk and tendril-like branches a model of strength and grace under the weight of the ripe, round fruit and oversized leaves. Elsewhere in the exhibition, birds and flowers and hearts abound. A crown, a sheep, a boat, and even the odd angel make appearances, too.
Anything but Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic, installation view. Courtesy American Folk Art Museum. Pictured, right: Hannah Cohoon, The Tree of Life, 1854.
The dense, nearly sumptuous compositions of Polly Jane Reed. Miranda Barber’s sweetly illustrative narrative drawing. The puzzling abstractions comprising the Sacred Sheet (1848) by Semantha Fairbanks and Mary Wicks. Anything but Simple is also a quiet celebration of a context in which women’s work was of equal value to that of men—an achievement unrivaled in most communities, intentional and otherwise. With faith and craft so intertwined, would it be accurate to call these women, these “instruments,” artists? They would have said no, and so should we. Rather than deform their labor to fit our limited understanding of art and its uses, better to expand our notion of what compels a hand to make something, or refresh our sense of vision, or think harder about which images are worth expressing and why. From the Shaker “gift” model, we might conceive of systems apart from the usual economies in which to circulate our creations, recognizing that value is not merely assessed in how our labor is bought or sold, but rather in our openness to receive and determination to give. Art does not need to be hifalutin, out of reach—godlike in its distance from daily life. After all, it is, quite simply, work.
Jennifer Krasinski is a writer, critic, and editor.