Press

ALBANY, N.Y. - The New York State Museum's Shaker exhibition was so popular last fall, it's coming back for an encore this summer.

An expanded version featuring more than 200 Shaker artifacts will return from July 29 through Oct. 22, 2000, during A Shaker Legacy: The Shaker Collection at the New York State Museum in Exhibition Hall.

The State Museum has perhaps the largest collection of Shaker objects owned by any museum. In fact, Shakers themselves helped curators from 1926 to 1943 acquire this vast selection that includes more than 100,000 Shaker objects. The time was right. Shakers at Watervliet, Mt. Lebanon and other eastern communities were seeing their population dwindle, and sought to preserve their heritage and culture.

"The Shaker craze started here -- back in 1926," said John Scherer, associate curator of decorative arts. "The exhibition was very popular. It generated a lot of interest, but was only up for a short period. We thought we'd bring it back for people who didn't have an opportunity to see it."

The exhibition will be about the artifacts as much as how the Museum collected them.

"The reason this collection is so important is that we got it from the source," Scherer said. "The Shakers were here to tell us how the objects were made and how they were used."

Additionally, never-before-seen photographs by William F. Winter (1899-1939) will be displayed in a separate gallery. Winter, a Schenectady photographer, documented the Shakers and sparked the interest of the Museum's director in collecting Shaker artifacts.

The Shaker Legacy will feature photos of the Watervliet settlement and how the furniture and machinery exhibited were used. It will also detail how Charles Adams, the director of the State Museum from 1926 to 1943, had the foresight to preserve this important American culture.

Featured in this exhibition will not only be decorative items like furniture, but also the raw materials and tools used to create these beautiful, yet simple, pieces.

The Shakers weren't just talented furniture builders; they were innovators and savvy business people who held many patents.

The Shakers' contributions include the flat broom and the clothespin; they claimed to have invented the circular saw and to have come up with the innovative idea to place seeds in paper envelopes.

The only intact Fountain Stone that survives from any Shaker community will also be on display. The stone, used for religious rituals, was discovered when the state was building the Craig Developmental Center at the site of the Groveland Shaker community in Livingston County.

The New York State Museum will be updating and reissuing a catalog for this exhibition titled A Shaker Legacy: The Shaker Collection at the New York State Museum.

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*For slides, please call 518-486-2003.

To view the previous exhibition, please visit www.nysm.nysed.gov/history/shaker/index.html

The New York State Museum is open 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.