Description

In June 2016, the Luce Foundation’s American Art Program awarded a two-year grant of $750,000 to the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, to create a publicly accessible electronic catalogue of the museum’s permanent collection. Sensing that this grant might provide an opportunity for fruitful programmatic collaboration, shortly after the grant was announced I initiated a series of conversations with Terry Carbone. The grant being recommended here results from those initial conversations, and from subsequent discussions with both Lacy Schutz, the Executive Director of the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, and Kathryn Reklis, a faculty member in Fordham University’s Department of Theology.
 
Working together closely, Reklis and Schutz have crafted a proposal for a project that would “ respond to the work of the museum with a creative, trans-disciplinary and trans-institutional project that will unite thinking about art, religion, and social transformation from the academy, artistic practice, and museums.” As their proposal describes, the grant would foster efforts to deepen understanding of Shaker art, design, and religion, while also encouraging creative thinking about programming on Shaker material culture and religious history within museum spaces. Grant funds would support a series of gatherings in both New York and New Lebanon (the location of the museum), and provide limited support for the project’s co-leaders. Gatherings will include scholars, museum professionals, and working artists. Additional potential outcomes may include a series of web-based essays or more traditional academic publication, and a public conference, exhibition or symposium to share the fruits of the project.
 
The Theology Program has a well-established history of focusing on the relationship of religion and material culture, and its grantmaking in religion and the arts is perhaps most associated with emphases initiated by former president John Cook in the early 1990s. More recently, grants to Yale University, Duke University, Bard Graduate Center, and others have continued the attention to the importance of “material religion.”