Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic For a small religious community on the verge of extinction, the Shakers have left a bright and lasting mark. Believers in perfection and simplicity, they brought God into their labours, creating objects that stand as beacons of purity. They saw work as worship, and imbued every task — baking pies, erecting barns, weaving cloth — with the aspiration to fix a broken world and bring the kingdom of heaven on Earth just a little bit closer.“The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it,” wrote poet and theologian Thomas Merton.Anything But Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic, at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, celebrates that marriage of the extraordinary and the everyday. This small but elegant exhibition has a few of the starkly plain items that collectors salivate over: one of those angel-ready chairs, a handsome wooden table, a stack of oval nesting boxes that could almost be a scale model of a Richard Serra sculpture.The pared-down style dovetailed almost too well with the 20th century’s ideals of form and function. Modernist artists embraced the Shakers’ streamlined austerity and spareness of ornament. They had less interest in the religious dimension of functional objects, or the idea that crafting a table and sewing, eating or labouring at it were all forms of prayer.Those products were also a means of exchange: the sale of seeds, crafts and cloaks helped a culture of renunciation stay solvent. And, as the show’s curator Emelie Gevalt reveals, the Shakers also made and swapped elaborate, ecstatic drawings inscribed with visions of love, nature, the heavens and faith. Women poured into these intricate tokens all the effusiveness and ardour that they kept under strict control in the rest of their lives. Trees blossom wildly into colour, messages in tiny handwriting stream into arches and heart shapes, minutely detailed birds whirl in a paper sky and mysterious symbols proliferate.The Shakers emerged out of a Quaker sect in 18th-century Manchester (England, not New Hampshire). The founder, Ann Lee, was an illiterate factory worker and hospital cook who bore and lost four children, and those repeated tragedies seemingly led her to reject both marriage and sex. In 1774, she and a small band of followers sailed to America, where they hoped to freely practise their radical form of Christianity.The group dedicated itself to gender and racial equality, celibacy, pacifism and sacrifice. (They welcomed Black members but refused to fight in the civil war; Lincoln himself granted the Shakers a dispensation as the first conscientious objectors.) Theirs was a strictly communitarian society; the collective good took precedence over individual desire, and spiritual striving outweighed worldly things.Joining the fellowship meant relinquishing property and family, dissolving marriages and entrusting children to designated caregivers. Men, women and kids all lived separately. Although the birth rate in Shaker villages was officially zero, the movement grew through persuasion. Settlements cropped up from Maine to Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. At the zenith in 1840, 6,000 members populated 19 villages.Despite all that ostentatious sobriety, a strain of frenzy ran through the sect’s history. The name, a contraction of Shaking Quakers, referred to the way that, in the early days, meetings would break out into ecstatic dance. After the death of Lee (called “Mother Ann”) in 1784, ritual took the place of spontaneity, and restraint became the rule.That’s where the drawings come in. In the mid-19th century, known as the Era of Manifestations, Believers received visions and spiritual messages from long-deceased founders. That fervour, and the urge to share it, came out in art that brimmed with forbidden ornament, spontaneous inspiration, and even sensual beauty. It is enthusiastically imperfect, expressive as well as stylised, joyful rather than dutiful. The women who made these pieces presented them to their spiritual brothers and sisters, annotated with passionate declarations that were understood to have emanated from the Beyond — valentines with a godly overlay.Mother Ann bestowed one such posthumous message on Nancy Oaks, passing it through Polly Laurence, who dictated it to Polly Collins, who in 1857 incorporated it into a rapturous drawing. “My love is increasing / My love is unceasing,” reads the text. “Tho’ tempests should beat, and floods may descend, / I’ll stand by your side, be your Mother, & friend.”In the illustration, “A Tree of Love, A Tree of Life” breaks into bloom, its branches aflutter with jewel-like fruits and blossoms. Symmetrical leaves alternate between autumn and spring colours, conflating the seasons. The tree also bears three two-toned berries that look vaguely like bonneted heads, perhaps belonging to Nancy and the two Pollys.In 1845, yet another Polly (Reed, this time) wrote a long and loving message from “Abraham of Old” to one Rufus Bishop on to the shape of a bright green leaf on a white ground. In its graphic clarity, and its distillation of botanical profusion into a single silhouette and vivid hue, Reed’s leaf could practically be an Ellsworth Kelly from a century later.Semantha Fairbanks and Mary Wicks gave Sister Adah Zillah Potter a “Sacred Sheet” covered in blue-ink runes. Those searching for references to the physical world might come up with sun rays, ripples, trails, rivers, or bird prints in the snow. But look even closer, and the missive dissolves into calligraphic abstraction that looks more Islamic than Christian.Some of that spiritual excitement, sublimated into artworks that are as refined as they are idiosyncratic, permeates the museum’s galleries. You get the feeling of a rich material — but not materialistic — culture, a web of close friendships, a society that discovered outlets for people’s verve and that allowed, even cultivated, exceptions to its own rules.As of a few months ago, the Shakers’ numbers had declined to one Brother and one Sister in Maine, but even as the movement dies out you can sense its old appeal. Somehow those rural women in the 19th century channelled their impulses into the tip of a pen and released a force that still makes itself felt.To January 26 2025; folkartmuseum.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
