Description

The Shaker Museum (SM) was founded in 1950 by John S. Williams in Old Chatham, NY. Williams traveled widely to active Shaker communities and purchased or was given examples of their arts and industries, and spiritual artifacts. As individual communities continued to close, the Shakers identified Williams’s museum as the preferred repository for their objects, historical records, and the library from their central ministry at Mount Lebanon. SM today houses the world’s most comprehensive and best-preserved Shaker collection, numbering 16,000 objects. 
Since the 2009 closure of its original Chatham complex of non-Shaker farm buildings, SM has been without a permanent exhibition facility and has offered only occasional, seasonal exhibitions at the former Shaker community in Mount Lebanon. SM is now poised to establish a new and permanent home in a once-abandoned commercial loft building in downtown Chatham. The ambitious renovation project has attracted major capital funding from entities including the New York State Empire Development Fund and the National Endowment for the Humanities. SM seeks Luce funding for the inaugural, long-term collection installations that will anchor the new Chatham facility when it opens in 2023. 
Preliminary discussions about this proposed grant began shortly after SM completed an ambitious Luce-funded (2016) project to create its first comprehensive and publicly accessible digital collection catalogue. According to SM’s director, Lacy Schutz, the project allowed SM to introduce the depth and breadth of its collections to national and international audiences and provided the groundwork on which to base plans for long-term collection care and housing. Schutz moreover has identified the 2016 Luce grant as the pivotal investment that she and the SM board leveraged to inspire donor confidence in the launch of their major capital campaign. The American Art Program sees this potential new grant for the long-awaited public presentation of the collection as an appropriate bookend to its initial grant. 
Slated to open in the new Annabelle-Seldorf-designed museum building in 2023, the long-term inaugural installations, “Shaker Belief, Shaker Life, Shaker Community,” will explore American Shakerism through its material culture and the lens of the religion’s radical foundational values of equality, inclusion, and accessibility. Guided by the Shaker concept 
of union—being deeply connected and on equal footing—the installations look more deeply into how art and design can convey, construct, and disseminate spiritual beliefs, community formation, approaches to labor and industry. And while acknowledging the significant impact of Shaker aesthetics on modernist design, they will also seek to convey the alignment of the values that informed the Shaker aesthetic with the efforts in contemporary American society to achieve equity and stronger communities. 
Some of the ideas on which the installations will be based were developed through a set of cross-disciplinary convenings funded by a Luce Foundation Religion and Theology Program grant to Fordham University and focused on the intersections of art and religion in public spaces. They include: gender equity and gender-specific labor; and the modesty of Shaker life vs. the adorned imagination within Shakerism. Inspired by Shaker communitarianism, SM will explore new models for community-based engagement in the creation of the installation and in extensive programming. With an anticipated annual attendance of 30,000, SM will particularly seek to serve a broad regional community and its educational resources. 
The SM project team consists of Maggie Taft (curator), Bianca Felix Biberaj (Research Assistant), Jerry Grant (Director of Collections and Research) and Lacy Schutz (Executive Director). SM has assembled an advisory group to consult on content development, exhibition strategies, and inclusion: Ruth Abram, founder of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum; Courtney Bender, scholar of American religions at Columbia University; Ashon Crawley, artist and scholar of black studies, queer theory, sound studies, and theology at the University of Virginia; Gretchen Sorin, of the Cooperstown Graduate Program in museum studies; and Ilyon Woo, an expert in the intersections between Shaker culture, gender, and American law. 
Grant funding would support the research and conservation of collection objects, planning and implementation of the installations, a wide array of public programs, and rich digital offerings to extend the reach of the physical galleries. When originally conceived, this grant was to be proposed at the level of $460,000. With the American Art Program continuing to set aside funds again this year to address urgent needs at museums adversely effected pandemic-related income loss, a decision was made to approach the grant in two phases. The AAP plans to bring a second grant, for $230,000, before the board in March of 2022, ultimately raising the Luce support for the project to 60%.