ICA Philadelphia Brings Shaker Design and Belief Into Contemporary Focus
A spare wooden staircase, a proselytizing journal, and a compact sewing desk are not the usual anchors of a contemporary art exhibition. Yet they sit at the center of “A World in the Making: The Shakers,” a new presentation at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (ICA) that places Shaker material culture in direct conversation with seven interdisciplinary contemporary artists.
The exhibition arrives amid a broader resurgence of interest in the Shakers, formally known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. Their legacy of radical simplicity, communal life, pacifism, gender equality, and mandatory celibacy has long shaped American design history, but the ICA show frames those values as living questions rather than settled heritage.
During a press walkthrough, ICA Philadelphia chief curator Hallie Ringle pointed to what she described as the Shakers’ “unwavering commitment to order and purpose,” noting that many artists today are returning to Shaker culture as a lens on faith, labor, and collective life. That contemporary pull helped motivate a multi-institution collaboration with the Vitra Design Museum in Germany and the Milwaukee Art Museum, with additional support from the Shaker Museum in New York. “We hope to bring their legacy in conversation with our present moment,” Ringle said.
At the heart of the exhibition are more than 100 Shaker objects — furniture, tools, textiles, and everyday goods — selected to illuminate how belief was embedded in daily practice. The ICA’s curatorial strategy is to let these objects operate not as period décor, but as evidence: of systems, rules, and ideals that shaped bodies and spaces.
Jerry Grant, director of library and collections at the Shaker Museum, which provided and helped select the bulk of the historical material, offered a close reading of several key works that appear in the show.
One is an issue of “The Shaker Manifesto,” vol. X, no. 5 (May 1880), part of a publication effort that began as the communities faced demographic pressure. By 1870 — more than a century after the Shakers’ founding — the movement sought new ways to attract members, Grant explained. A monthly journal became one such tool. It began in a small newspaper format and, after about 1879, shifted into “The Shaker Manifesto,” which continued publication until 1899. Grant described it as “basically a proselytizing journal,” but also a practical connective tissue among far-flung communities, carrying updates and articles that ranged from recipes to theology.
Another highlight is a freestanding staircase from the North Family dwelling house at Mount Lebanon, New York (1846). The object is striking for its plain engineering, but its social meaning is sharper. Shaker buildings were organized around gender separation, and the staircase came from a hallway used by Shaker women. In the exhibition, it becomes a physical index of the movement’s strict celibacy — a spiritual discipline that also contributed to a dwindling population over time.
Grant noted that the staircase ran from the fourth floor to an attic storage area where off-season clothing, bedding, and supplies were kept. He believes it may have been the only freestanding staircase in that building not attached to a wall. The dwelling house itself was dismantled in 1973 after the unoccupied structure developed a leaking roof and was considered a fire hazard. When architectural elements were sold at auction, the Shaker Museum acquired the staircase.
A third object, the Brother Eli Kidder sewing desk (1861), points to shifting labor and economics within Shaker life. Kidder was a cabinet maker at the Canterbury Shaker community in New Hampshire. Around the Civil War, Grant said, Shaker economics changed, and women increasingly carried the burden of producing goods that could be sold — a reminder that even communities built on spiritual ideals were shaped by market realities.
By pairing contemporary artists with these artifacts, “A World in the Making: The Shakers” asks what it means to inherit a visual language of restraint without inheriting the belief system that produced it. In a moment when many artists are rethinking community, devotion, and the ethics of making, the Shakers’ disciplined objects offer something rarer than nostalgia: a model of how values can be built into form — and how costly that coherence can be.
