I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older, I’ve understood museum curation just a little bit more. When I was younger I just wanted the big paintings, the big sculptures, the big blockbusters (I sat and watched Marina Abramović for hours as she looked at people for hours and it was great hours but a lot of hours of watching watching). When I met Evan Snyderman and R & Company, who contribute to this publication, I started really having a desire to see other things, the parts of art that is seamlessly engrained into our daily lives. So what I appreciate now is a great furniture and design show; architecture, interiors, chairs, lighting, daily objects. I find this is a direction of good aging and more insightful looking, to be honest.
Which is why I was drawn to the new show at the Institute of Contemporary Art University of Pennsylvania entitled, A World in the Making: The Shakers, looking at the creations of the religious group but also the idea of community, labor and equality played into everything they did. What started in 1700s England and migrated to the America, the Shakers were spread across roughly 19 communities, mostly in New England to Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. Many of the designs are still in tact today, as in we use them in other modes of design, but there is something about thinking about equality and labor that strikes a chord in 2026, in the western world, right here, right now.
Besides durability and endurance, what made Shaker design feel so democratic were some of the essential principles: the Shaker maxim of “Beauty rests on utility” is essential here. Every object had to serve a clear purpose, an elimination of unnecessary ornamentation or decoration, and clean, geometric lines that emphasized the object's function. But what I found interesting when I read about Shaker design years ago was this common idea: they were creating objects for collective rather than individual use. Furniture could adapt to communal living needs. It was about a community not an individual, which, as I know would scare of a Randian, but today, with a fractured social order, The Shakers, and to the extent this show, demonstrate when we as societies are at our best and thinking of each other.
There is a Shaker saying that goes "Do your work as though you had a thousand years to live, and as if you were to die tomorrow." I’m not sure you can see it in the designs, but there is definitely something that feels foundational, strong and smart about the designs in the show. But there is something clear and beautiful in the timeless attempt to thing of a collective soul. —Evan Pricco
