On a Thursday afternoon in late summer Frances McDormand, the actor, and Suzanne Bocanegra, a conceptual artist, were testing out a Shaker cradle for adults. The exhibit of these little-known furniture items that they put together for the Shaker Museum’s pop-up gallery was days from opening in the Kinderhook Knitting Mill — a converted historic space in Columbia County, N.Y.
McDormand climbed into the handsome, coffin-size lidless wooden box — one of several, along with a baby cradle and rocking chairs on display. She was lying on her back with her arms crossed over her chest. Her position was moribund, her mind alert.
“That’s too rough,” she said to Bocanegra about her friend’s rocking technique, while a soothing soundtrack (composed by David Lang) of Shaker-inspired lullabies played. “Try to pay attention to the music.” Bocanegra slowed her rocking and McDormand nodded as a wisp of a smile overtook her face. She sighed. “Lying down in here like this — you just feel very secure,” she said.
“Hands to work, hearts to God,” the often used Shaker motto, applies to everything from farming and cooking to the emotionally demanding responsibility of elder care. Because they were celibate, Shakers didn’t have many infants around — although there were some older children who came when new members joined. And so the large cradles they used for comforting older adults in infirmaries were more common than ones for babies. And there were plenty of elders to care for in Shaker communities because of the notable longevity among this hardworking health-conscious sect.
“People continued to govern as they aged and young people turned to their elders for advice,” said McDormand, who once performed in a show inspired by early Shaker spirituals with the Wooster Group, the New York experimental theater company.
When she first saw a Shaker cradle in a book of photographs, something clicked. “They put so much energy into the beautiful things they made, and they were ready to comfort their people when the time came,” she said. She thought about being able to grow old in a caring community and about the regrets she had for not being around for her adoptive parents when they died. She also thought about the time she spent at the bedside of a dying friend.
“I helped with changing her diapers and feeding her and keeping her from choking,” she said. “We all need that kind of care and the Shakers seemed to really know how to prepare for it.”
With these thoughts in mind she contacted Bocanegra, a friend from New York City who also had regrets about her time with her dying mother. They brought the idea of presenting a small and soulful off-site installation they called “Cradled” to the upstate Shaker Museum.
In the gallery, with shades drawn to keep out the September sunshine, McDormand got out of the cradle and the women, both 67, switched places. The actress sat in a straight-backed Shaker chair and with the trained precision of someone as mindful as she is intuitive, she rocked Bocanegra, who was sighing.
“Doesn’t that feel nice,” McDormand asked. “I figured out that it’s better to push it one way not back and forth.”
They were concerned with getting it right because they would be rocking Joan Jonas, the revered video artist, who is 88, for the exhibition’s mid-September opening event. Earlier they had tried out a “fireman’s carry,” forming a seat with their interlinked hands in anticipation of helping get Jonas into the cradle. They weren’t sure about it, but their rocking needed little finessing. Bocanegra, whose work includes weavings and performance pieces, and who, like McDormand, wore an outfit and apron with a plain utilitarian vibe, closed her eyes.
“It’s like being swaddled,” she said.
McDormand, known for her no-nonsense empathetic roles, nodded as she rocked her friend. She surmised that the act of rocking might be as good for the person doing the rocking as the person being rocked — just as it is for anxious mothers comforting babies.
“Providing this kind of care comes naturally,” she said. “You just know what to do.”
Along with their adult cradles, and other spare and functional dressers, communal tables and chairs with woven fabric seats, the Shakers designed all kinds of useful items. Often, they perfected the ideas of others — perhaps after reading magazines they subscribed to, such as Scientific American. They came up with their own flat-ended brooms, steam-driven washers, power saws and even an electric-shock machine for pain relief and physical therapy.
“They had to sell many things because they needed the money,” said Jerry Grant, the museum’s director of collections and libraries. “They always made a point of paying taxes even though they didn’t have to because they felt it was their responsibility to participate.”
Grant oversees a collection of more than 18,000 objects housed in barns in Old Chatham, N.Y., which is near Mount Lebanon, the Shaker founding settlement that became an administrative center for the group as it grew from its birth in 18th-century England to the 19th-century United States. Ultimately, the group would spawn 5,000 members in 19 settlements east of the Mississippi.
The collection of objects, the largest in the world, had been originally amassed by John S. Williams, a New Yorker with a farm upstate who started admiring Shaker design in the 1920s, around the time modernism was informing architecture with a more streamlined aesthetic.
“It was both modern and a callback to colonial revival style,” Grant said.
But even as membership has waned (The New York Times Magazine recently reported on the last two practicing Shakers in Sabbathday Lake, Maine) interest in the aesthetic and ethos has grown. Right now, the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan has an exhibition showing rare Shaker drawings. And next year the Shaker Museum aims to break ground on a 27,000-square-foot museum and learning center in Chatham — seven miles from the barns that store the collection. The plans include a new glass building attached to a pre-existing brick one in Chatham’s historic center. It is designed by Annabelle Selldorf, the prizewinning architect.
Now, as then, keeping the group’s idealism and spirit alive is a preoccupation.
“One thing we know,” Grant said, “is that they had to bring in new members when their numbers were waning.” To that end they published a magazine and started harmonizing in church to make the singing more appealing. One member invented a portable “piano violin” to travel and spread the word. They doubled down on selling packaged seeds (their invention) and herbal medicines in settlement shops with the zeal they applied to farming, cooking and prayer.
There was even an unlikely “Shaker Action Doll” in the 1970s — a Barbie-like figure dressed in handmade garb. When McDormand and Bocanegra found one in the museum archive (along with a handsome maple walker that McDormand, a design aficionado, covets for her old age) they engaged a seamster to design miniature Shaker outfits to sell.
“We’re calling her Bertha so we don’t get in trouble with Mattel,” McDormand said as she displayed a doll that could have been her miniature sister in a room that serves as a giftshop.
“And now we need to make a bunch of tiny hangers to display Bertha’s outfits,” Bocanegra said.
Moments later, they were doing so with some wire. Then, McDormand who had been a flurry of cheerful activity all afternoon, started to iron some tote bags, also to be sold.
“I love ironing, it’s meditative and it keeps me from smoking,” she said with a grin.
Visitors to the exhibition are not invited to iron or lie down in the cradles. Instead, they are invited to use the rocking chairs and keep themselves from being idle by doing some work. McDormand and Bocanegra have included baskets with wool, knitting needles, seeds and seed packaging. “Take your time. Rock yourself. Mend if you’d like,” suggested a poem the two women wrote together and had printed in a historic font to mount above the cradles.
Between the many prepping activities consuming them all afternoon, McDormand had stopped to do some knitting herself.
“When this exhibition closes, we will have the longest scarf in the world,” she said.
Her needles clicked over the soundtrack of lullabies and creaking cradles.
Through Dec. 1 (Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays) at the Kinderhook Knitting Mill, 8 Hudson Street, second floor, Kinderhook, N.Y. It is affiliated with the Shaker Museum; 518-225-6383; shakermuseum.us.
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