‘Simple Gifts’: Met exhibit explores Shaker design
The Shakers, an industrious and pious New England sect that rose to prominence in the 19th century but whose membership has now dwindled from thousands to three, have long had an outsize influence on design and designers.
A new installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Simple Gifts: Shaker at the Met,” explores Shaker furniture and textiles and their impact. The installation, which opened this summer, remains on view through June 25, 2017.
The Shakers arrived from England in 1774 and saw industriousness as a way of praising God. They embraced communal property, communal living, and racial and gender equality, all radical concepts at the time.
Their furniture, while streamlined and functional, also conveys a modern sensibility.
“They worked very hard to design their furniture according to the golden mean of proportion, and features like graduated drawers were designed using complex calculations,” said Michael Graham, director of the SabbathDay Lake Shaker Museum in Gloucester, Maine, site of the only remaining Shaker community. “It had clean lines but was not at all simple.”
Unlike some religious sects, the Shakers were far from insular. They were brilliant at marketing, selling their goods through catalogs and in resort communities along the East Coast, said Alyce Perry Englund, assistant curator of American Decorative Arts at the Met, who curated the installation.
Their pragmatism and quest for efficiency led them to use lathes to produce turned chair spindles, and in some cases they made clothing using ready-made fabrics, she said. They borrowed ideas they found useful, such as a revolving chair from 1851 that was a precursor to modern ergonomic office chairs. An 1855 piano stool using the same technology and a revolving Shaker chair sit side by side in the installation.
The Shakers added tilting discs to chairs’ back legs to make them easier to lean back in; put wheels on beds to facilitate cleaning under them; and commonly used pegs set in rails high on a wall to hang chairs and keep them out of the way when they weren’t in use.
They designed one of the earliest known wrinkle-free waterproof fabrics, and came up with