Amie Cunat's '2nd Meetinghouse' (2025) opens 'A World in the Making: The Shakers' at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia -- appropriately. A meetinghouse stood at the center of every village created by the Shakers, the separatist and celibate Christian religious sect founded in the 18th century that was devoted to communal living and simple, functional design. But this rendition is different. It offers the customary plain benches inside, but other interior features, like an iron stove, sit outside. And Amie Cunat, the artist, painted it not the traditional white, but in shocking Yves Klein blue.
The piece encapsulates 'A World in the Making', a curious mix of old and new. By merging then and now, it plunges visitors into a milieu they may know only through a Shaker bentwood box, and it signals that this exhibition aims to explore the relevance of Shaker ideas today. The meetinghouse was, after all, an inclusive place where, despite gender segregation, Shaker men and women came together (sitting on opposite sides of the room) to worship; and blue, even if jarringly electric, is a holy color to Shakers, a representation of heaven.
'A World in the Making', organized by the ICA's Hallie Ringle and her curatorial team, as well as curators at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany and the Milwaukee Art Museum, presents more than 100 Shaker furniture pieces, tools, textiles and other handcrafted quotidian goods that date to the 18th and 19th centuries, and 10 contemporary works inspired by the Shakers. Occupying two large galleries and displayed in themes like 'When We Have Found a Good Thing, We Stick to It.' the exhibit will remain on view through Aug. 9.
The Shakers, with their signature spare style, have had an outsize impact on material culture, considering their numbers -- a peak estimated at 6,000 members in the mid-19th century -- and segregation from the world. For them, labor was a spiritual act; function guided form; beauty lay in simplicity; well-designed objects need never change.
The homely wooden-handled corn broom (c. 1900), hung here like a wall sculpture with similar utensils, exists in almost exactly the same form all these decades later. So, too, do blanket chests, like one made of pine and painted forest green (1820), and side chairs, like a maple one with a webbed seat (c. 1840-60). Garden seeds sell even today in individual paper packets reputedly devised by the Shakers, and are sometimes kept in slatted boxes (c. 1860-80); the polished wood chest (1825-50) with two banks of nine drawers graduated in size looks gratifyingly useful.
The Shakers never claimed to have invented objects like these. They just made them with their own aesthetic and adapted them to match their principles. Near an infant's cradle sits an elongated adult cradle (both c. 1830) offering comfort to the elderly and terminally ill thus embracing life from birth to death. A wheelchair made from a wooden rocking chair (c. 1830) attests to the Shakers' welcoming of disabled members.
To remain viable, they sold things. They turned their wool cloaks, here represented by a gray one (c. 1875), into a lucrative industry (Frances Cleveland wore one to her husband's second presidential inauguration in 1893). They embellished their sewing accessories with satin, velvet and ribbons for the public. Stackable, gently curved oval boxes (1835-60), identifiable by their swallowtail joints, attracted many buyers.
Oddly, the exhibition's contemporary pieces mostly ignore the Shaker philosophy of staying simple. For example, Finnegan Shannon's "I Want to Believe" (2025) consists of five vertical banners, painted blue, each containing snippets of vintage advertisements for pain relievers, such as "Generates Soothing Heat" and "Improves Blood Flow." The label links it to Shaker medicines and assistive devices, adding that the piece "speaks to the hope that technology can provide support in a disabled life while acknowledging how it is often shaped by harmful power structures." That's too big a burden for the banners to carry.
Likewise, Kameelah Janan Rasheed's embroidered piece, "'And at the time I was told to gather home . . . the time had come for me to gather home' (Rebecca Cox Jackson, 237)" (2025-26), requires explanation. It refers to the writings of Jackson, who led a black Shaker settlement. Ms. Rasheed turns Jackson's handwriting into illegible glyphs -- which might allude to the village's disappearance, but the label says the artwork comments on "the divergence of laws as written and as lived" and "the uncertainty inherent within archives and memory."
Aside from Ms. Cunat's piece, two video works come closest to the exhibition's intent. David Hartt's "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Tree of Light)" (2025) refracts images of trees and plants at a Shaker site, a meditation on the role of Shakers as stewards of nature and its link to God. And in Reggie Wilson's short film, "POWER-Every Movement Is Sacred" (2025), the Fist & Heel Performance Group emulates the energetic dances Shakers used to express religious fervor, accompanied by the clapping, singing and shout-outs of black churches. Made in collaboration with Aitor Mendilibar, the fascinating video imagines what black Shaker worship could be.
On the whole, though, the contemporary works disappoint. The simplicity of the Shaker objects exerts a power that is, at best, difficult to discern in the self-consciousness of most of the show's recent pieces.