Gathering Up the Fragments of Shaker Life

   If you live within a two hour drive of Portland Museum of Art and have not yet seen Gather Up the Fragments: The Andrews Shaker Collection (through February 5, 2012), I strongly urge you to do so. But before you do, it might help to get in the proper frame of mind. Take a few deep, cleansing breaths, empty your head of the clutter and head of daily life, and then enter into the spirit of exhibition.    I suggest this because of the jarring dichotomy between the lively public art scene the evening I saw the Shaker show and the selfless quietism embodied in the 200 artifacts of Shaker material culture on display.

Portland’s First Friday Art Walks are not to be missed. There are thousands of people in the streets, hundreds wandering the galleries of the Portland Museum of Art (which is free on Friday evenings from 5 to 9), and block party atmosphere with street vendors and buskers prevails from Longfellow Square to the Old Port. But there’s something discordant about going gallery hopping then out for a meal and drink when the main event is an exhibition of objects made by people who withdrew from the world, sought to extinguish self and to glorify God.    The fact that Shakers insisted on celibacy pretty much guaranteed their extinction. Where there were once 5,000 Shakers in the 19^th century, there are four or five today, the tiny community at Sabbathday Lake in New Gloucester, Maine. Indeed, Shakers themselves are museum pieces themselves in the 21^st century.

Edwin Deming Andrews (1894-1964) and his wife Faith Young Andrews (1896-1990) were pioneering Shaker scholars and collectors, acquiring their collection of Shaker furniture, tool, clothing, and art between the 1920s and the 1960s. Gather Up the Fragments, which is now touring, was first exhibited at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 2008 and 2009. The Andrews Collection came to Portland following stops earlier this year at the Stamford Museum and Nature Center in Stamford, CT, and the First Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, TN. When it leaves Portland, it will travel to the Mitchell Gallery, St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, and the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, WI.

The objects on exhibit all manifest the Shaker aesthetic (or is it an ethic?) of plain, unadorned, functional simplicity. They are one-of-a-kind handmade objects that long-dead Shakers have taken great care to make for a world they rejected. There are excellent examples, of course, of the boxes, baskets and chairs we all associate with Shaker style, but I found myself spending the most time examining more unusual creations.    There is, for example, a pine and butternut cobbler’s bench from the Mount Lebanon, NY, community that just begged to be sat upon, the seat and work surface upholstered in leather. And there are wooden hat forms and hat shapers used to make the flat-brimmed hats that Shaker men wore. Simple and functional and very agrarian, but it did occur to me that fieldworkers in other parts of the world fashion far simpler hats.

The object I found the most captivating however, even a bit haunting, is an adult cradle of pine and red wash. Shakers used the adult cradles in their infirmaries to rock the elderly and infirm. The idea that some dear soul about to meet his or her maker was gently rocked in this contraption, essentially a narrow coffin on rockers, struck me as a testament to compassionate design.   [Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square, Portland ME. 207-775-6148.]