The Institute for Contemporary Art presents A World in the Making: The Shakers

Originally called Shaking Quakers, the religious group (founded in 18th-century Manchester, England) came to America because of persecution and established 20 communities from Kentucky to Maine. They were deeply rooted in a spirituality that valued labor and the beauty of the everyday. Since their beliefs also included celibacy, the sect is dying out, but their visual legacy is still very much alive.

Interior beauty

Spread over two floors of the ICA’s accommodating galleries, A World in the Making features the requisite and very beautiful Shaker furniture which the sect is best-known for—and which still has an outsize influence on the design world, where it’s remarkably relevant and sought after. But showcasing objects from the mundane to the inspirational, the exhibition affords a deeper view of their insular yet expansive world.

It’s best to begin on the ICA’s easily accessible second floor, where most of the exhibition’s 150 pieces are displayed, all identified with dates and a maker (when known). Here are those Shaker items you might expect: remarkable chairs, tables, chests, peg rails, and shelves. But there are other everyday items—brooms, beautiful baskets, textiles, embroidery, and utilitarian objects—that attest to their makers’ artistry and versatility, tellingly displayed as they were created, with the same intentionality and beauty as the larger, more well-known pieces.

In a vitrine are exquisite sewing implements, including a remarkable sewing carrier (1850) made of various fruitwoods, lined with blue satin and fitted with a gorgeous inlaid lid. Though plainness was a goal, an intimate piece like this shows that individual artistry was also celebrated. It is telling that such elegance, here and in other pieces, was meant for only the user.

Some Shaker communities had print shops, and on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art is The Holy City (1843), a print by Sister Polly Ann Reed. Called a “gift drawing” and created to illustrate the connection to the divine espoused by Mother Ann, it was referred to as a “Mother’s Work”. And displayed movingly side by side are two (c.1830) cradles, one for babies (the Shakers took in abandoned or orphaned children) and one for adults designed to “offer comfort to the elderly and the terminally ill.”

Timely and timeless

Unlike the Amish, Shakers didn’t totally absent themselves from the evolving world around them. Throughout the exhibition are unexpected reminders of their inventiveness and engagement with the culture at large. There is a metal cutter repurposed from a sewing machine; a wheelchair with wooden wheels made from a rocking chair; an innovative stove that heated four irons at once; a measuring ruler and slide (c.1880) much more beautiful than it needed to be; and a surprising 1925 radio of butternut wood and Bakelite.

While the second floor is packed with these material culture items, the exhibition’s first floor explores (quite differently) the sect’s mystery and spiritual dimension. Throughout the exhibition are 10 contemporary commissioned works (by seven artists) that intersect and interact with the Shaker pieces, and three works on the first floor are particularly arresting.

Amie Cunat’s 2^nd Meetinghouse (2025) is a walk-in recreation of a Shaker place of worship. Created of paper, cardboard, and other simple materials with shiplap walls, benches, clear windows, and wall pegs (painted a vibrant blue), it vibrates with an unexpected spirituality. From inside Cunat’s structure, you both see and hear Reggie Wilson’s nine-minute video POWER – Every Movement is Sacred (also 2025). The work (with haunting vocals and mesmeric dance by the Fist & Heel Performance Group) features performers clad in Shaker-evoking garments, and the sounds of their claps and stomps and music resonates so captivatingly that it’s hard to move on.

Juxtaposed on a nearby wall are two enlarged 19th-century prints that show Shakers dancing in both circular and linear formations, men and women separated. In the gallery, a very large wall case displays a few clothes hung on pegs, without mannequins that might reference a fashionista culture, their simplicity belied and underscored by their beauty and impeccable construction: two (c.1900) bonnets, an intricate hairnet cap (reminiscent of lace), a cream wool sweater, a blue-grey cloak with ribbon ties (c.1875), and a brown dress (c.1870-1900) of wool, silk, and cotton. With the exception of the bonnets, these garments are so timeless in design that they could be worn today.

The first floor houses the exhibition’s largest pieces, both old and new. Two works by Kameelah Janan Rasheed (12 and 15 feet long, both 2025-26) feature printing and embroidery on cotton sateen with almost-unreadable rune-like forms evoking the mystery of Shaker hymnody. Also in this airy gallery is a 10-foot-high staircase (c.1846) from the North family dwelling house in Mount Lebanon, New York. Made of pine, birch, and cherry, it has 12 stair steps (surely referencing Christ’s 12 apostles) that tantalizingly invite the viewer to climb. There’s also a 13-foot meetinghouse bench (c.1855) that equally invites a viewer to sit (not allowed, of course), though there is ample gallery seating to ponder these beautiful objects.

Where the crowded world fades away

A World in the Making has multiple partners. It was organized by the Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein, Germany), Milwaukee Art Museum, ICA Philadelphia, and Germany’s Wüstenrot Foundation in collaboration with the Shaker Museum in New Lebanon, New York. It was also curated by an international team: Zoë Ryan (former ICA director), Hallie Ringle (ICA’s chief curator), Mea Hoffman (a curator at Vitra Design Museum), and Shoshona Resnikoff (a curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum). Though many people and organizations were involved, the exhibition feels integrated and cohesive. This is its second location; it opened last summer at the Vitra and will head to Milwaukee in the fall.

The exhibition seeks not to romanticize or mythologize the Shakers, but to help viewers draw applicable lessons and new insights from creations whose usefulness and simplicity created a legendary design vocabulary. As it looks deeply and at things both old and new, the thoughtful serenity of A World in the Making helps our crowded world fade away. And the contrast between the pragmatism of its second-floor galleries and the ethereal quality of the first floor is in itself an illustration of the Shakers’ striving for that liminal space between the everyday and the eternal. That they found the eternal in the everyday is why their work moves us still.