Lacy Schutz, executive director of the Shaker Museum in Chatham, New York, has spent much of her working life preserving hidden pieces of history and making them accessible to the general public. Schutz had what she terms “a little bit of an unusual path” into the museum world: having completed masters degrees in poetry and information science, she trained as an archivist, going on to found the archive programme at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts — her first museum role. Three years later, she joined the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), tasked with bringing the institution’s collections online. At the Clark, Schutz had been dealing with renowned artworks by the likes of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and John Singer Sargent, but the MCNY’s collections were much more varied, encompassing such ephemeral material as early snapshots of New York neighbourhoods and garments worn by the city’s notable 20th-century women. And it was the safeguarding of these lesser-known objects and their accompanying stories that really ignited Schutz’s imagination.

Thus, when she was presented with the opportunity to join the Shaker Museum in 2016, after seven years spent in various leadership roles at MCNY, she jumped at the chance. The museum had been founded in 1948 by John Stanton Williams Senior, a stockbroker-turned-gentleman-farmer and devoted collector of the work of the Shakers — that late-18th-century Christian sect renowned for its exquisite craftsmanship, strict adherence to a celibate lifestyle and the frenetic mode of dance-based worship that gave it its name. When Shutz joined its ranks, the museum was still located in the original barn that Williams Sr. had dedicated to his 18,000-object collection, and its doors had been closed to the public since 2009. “When I came on, the museum was really floundering,” Schutz tells La Catena. "There had been all these different ideas and plans about what to do with it, but none of them were very achievable. When I arrived, it was clear that if we were going to have a museum, we needed to completely reimagine what it could be, which felt like a once-in-a-career opportunity."

The Shakers were founded in England in the late 18th century by Ann Lee, a textile worker from Manchester, who relocated the small religious community she’d fostered to New York in 1774. From the start, Lee championed self-sufficiency: the Shakers built their own buildings, grew their own food, and made all their own clothing and furnishings. “They believed that your labour was your form of worship. And all of that worship went towards trying to create a heaven on Earth,” explains Schutz of the sect’s exacting standards and quest for simple beauty, which extended to everything they produced. Ornamentation was deemed prideful, she notes, so the focus was on functionality, form and proportion.

Not only were the Shakers exceptional craftspeople, they were also highly innovative and enterprising — they invented the flat broom, the circular saw and the wheel-driven washing machine, and were the first Americans to sell packaged seeds. “When you see the collection, you see a lot of examples of products that they made for sale to support themselves,” explains Schutz. “The Shakers were brilliant business people and yet they lived communally, so they kind of straddled that line between ‘small c’ communism and capitalism in a way that is really useful for us to look at in the present day. And because everything they did was done to the very best of their ability, the word Shaker became synonymous with quality.” (Indeed, the Shakers’ work has proved far more enduring than the sect itself, which, having accrued 6,000 members at its peak in the 1800s, now boasts just three living practitioners).

Shedding light on this secret history, and inviting visitors to take its messages to heart, is key to Schutz’s vision for the Shaker Museum’s future. “I think that museums are best when they're places where we all learn together,” she says, “when they can give people a shared sense of cultural abundance, and encourage the idea that we can imagine a better future by looking at the past.” Schutz has already begun to enact this goal in inventive new ways. Since starting at the museum, she has brought onboard an advisory group of artists and designers known as the Makers’ Circle, including textile artist Sheila Hicks, industrial designer Ini Archibong, and architectural design practice Neri&Hu, among others, “to advance dialogue around the relationship between past and contemporary material culture and explore how makers express their values in their work.”

The museum’s recent exhibitions have all been curatorial collaborations with members of the Makers’ Circle. Fashion designer Emily Adams Bode recently curated The Commercialisation of Shaker Knits, exploring the evolution of Shaker knitting, and its influence on American athleticwear and fashion, including Bode’s own designs. While the museum’s current show The Alchemy of Re.Use sees design duo hettler.tüllmann spotlight the Shaker dedication to repurposing material. “Hettler.tüllmann are two women who also work with two different collectives in Ethiopia and Miami,” Schutz expands. “The one in Ethiopia weaves mats and pillow covers out of recycled clothing, while the Miami collective is a group of immigrant women who get together at a little public library and knit mats out of crocheted plarn, (torn up plastic bags converted into yarn) and distribute them to Miami’s homeless. It’s this beautiful embodiment of what the Shakers believed about being helpful and generous and loving, and not letting materials go to waste. Hettler.tüllmann has commissioned some pieces from these two groups, which we're showing alongside various pieces from our collection made from recycled textiles.”

Next up, Shutz explains, will be a collaboration with painter Caitlin MacBride, whose work, per her website, “engages material culture and artefacts in an exploration of labour and desire”. “Caitlin paintshyper-realistic paintings of Shaker objects in a very colourful way, and makes them seem very contemporary somehow. For our next show, she’s painted a number of objects from the collection which will be shown alongside the works.” Having collaborated more frequently with designers thus far, Schutz is excited to further the museum’s work with artists. “We worked with Amie Cunat [a Japanese American painter, colourist and installation artist] who did a residency at the historic site for a summer after we were granted New York State funding in 2019. She both curated a group exhibition, and then did her own installation reimagining the historic function of a Shaker granary. It’s great to work with artists who are able to interpret Shaker material culture and Shaker values.”