Last year I used this column to report on two friends, both antiques dealers, who repaired my indifference to duck decoys and weathervanes (July/August 2023). Robert Young and Patrick Bell were both patient and enlightening.
Such adventures in attitude adjustment are healthy at any age, but especially so as the years pile up. Just now I have had to rethink my attitude toward the Shakers and Shakerism. I am far from ignorant about the material culture associated with the ecstatic cult, but I am somewhat wary of the fetishism surrounding it, especially because it is, as it must be, accompanied by our ignorance of the lived experience at New Lebanon, New York, Hancock, Massachusetts, and the other communities that flourished in the sect’s early years.
We know what they made—the highly prized caneseated side chairs, the boxes, hanging shelves and the rest—but I don’t think we know much about what the spiritual or day-to-day life felt like despite the many books I’ve consulted over the years. This came to mind again as I considered the American Folk Art Museum’s exhibition of gift drawings, Anything but Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic.
The drawings are well known, but seeing a number of them together, I was overwhelmed by their sheer variety, meticulous exuberance, and especially by their mystery, not qualities we associate with the celebrated furniture. My first call was to the eminent Shaker dealer John Keith Russell, a friend whose generosity to me goes back years. John referred me to his colleague Sarah Margolis-Pineo, who has worked at both the American Folk Art Museum and Hancock Shaker Village and has a lot of experience with the drawings.
Before I would let John off so easily, I had questions. He answered, offering the kind of context that I welcomed. We know that the drawings come from the Shakers’ era of manifestations in the early nineteenth century, a time when their charismatic founder Mother Ann Lee was only a memory for many adherents. Reminding me that the Shakers “worked themselves nearly to death in an unnatural situation for both mind and body” and that as a consequence there were many apostates, he suggested that because the drawings, each representing one woman’s vision of heaven and given to a recipient who alone could understand its coded message, they may be signs of deliverance from difficult lives. John is a careful thinker. Were the young women who created these drawings using them to gain power in the community I wondered? “I don’t know,” he answered, adding that the drawings were shut down after nine or ten years. I decided to regard that as a speculative yes of sorts.
In pursuit of all we do not know, John follows the proceedings of obscure groups like the Boston Area Shakers Studies Group, whose findings rarely, if ever, flow into the mainstream. I like his willingness to rest in uncertainty until and unless further enlightenment should emerge.
When I talked with Sarah Margolis-Pineo, who has spent a lot of time with these works, I was further gratified when she said, “everything about these drawings surprises me,” cautioning me not to impose my ideas on them. She was willing to say that there seems to be a female lexicon embedded in them, a sisterhood of visual language of flowers in their transcriptions of encounters with the divine that amounts to a kind of visual speaking in tongues. Before we go too far down the road of a coded feminist uprising threatening the male hierarchy of the Shakers, she also questioned the prevailing wisdom that the Shakers had planned to burn or otherwise destroy them. “I’m not at all sure about that.” Duly noted.
What then are we to do with these intriguing works? Resting in uncertainty, a comfortable place for me where Shakerism is concerned, I went back to the drawings. The Folk Art Museum has been admirably cautious in providing information about them, sticking to what can be known about their creators and only occasionally suggesting equivalents for their many symbols (apples = love, cherries = hope, birds or doves = Christ’s spirit), which do not get us beyond the obvious, if they do as much as that, which I doubt. The museum has also, by way of contrast to the elaborate drawings, put on display some of the celebrated furniture on loan from private collections —a candlestand, a cane-seated tilter side chair, as well as nesting boxes and a few photographs and items of clothing.
I decided to indulge myself in a provisional appreciation of the drawings, knowing that as I did so I would inevitably be inventing, distorting, and satisfying personal whims. I allowed myself to delight in what I regard as their somewhat contrarian mysteries, even though I know that for both creator and recipient these transcribed messages from the afterlife were anything but mysterious. I also considered the wide variety of styles and colors on view, seeing both as slightly subversive of Shakerism, and indicative of a rebellious female spirit emerging from a community of unstable gender equality. That’s doubtless another self-indulgent and mistaken reading. If they are, as I initially preferred to regard them, examples of the return of all that has been repressed and also visions of glory quite different from the arduous existence of life on earth, I could be gratified . . . up to the point where I become aware of doing exactly what Sarah warned me against.
After this exercise in solipsism I looked again at the drawings and decided to appreciate them for what I do not know and cannot understand, being careful not to extract their beauty from their mystery. Doing so puts me where I should be—looking at mystery made palpable. It’s an experience I highly recommend.
