Press

ALBANY, N.Y. The New York State Museum will put more than 200 Shaker artifacts on display from Nov. 5, 1999, to Jan. 2, 2000, during A Shaker Legacy: The Shaker Collection at the New York State Museum in the West Gallery.

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.

"We started the Shaker craze back in 1926," said John Scherer, associate curator of decorative arts, who is organizing the exhibit. "We were avant-garde collecting Shaker before it was in vogue. The important thing about this collection is that it wasn't second-hand. We collected it from the source so we have the stories about these artifacts first-hand."

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

It became imperative to preserve the Shaker heritage after Albany County purchased the property of the Watervliet settlement for the Ann Lee Home and what is now the Albany International Airport.

"People were leaving. They couldn't maintain their huge land holdings, they had to liquidate, so to speak," Scherer said.

The Shaker Legacy, with funding provided by Niagara Mohawk and Agway Energy Products, will display photos of the Watervliet settlement and how the furniture and machinery featured in the exhibit 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.

The Shakers weren't just talented furniture builders; they were innovators and savvy business people who held many patents. Their contributions included the flat broom and the clothespin. They claimed to have invented the circular saw, as well as being the first to place seeds in paper envelopes.

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

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

Many of these items will be displayed for the first time since 1982, when the Museum commemorated the 50th anniversary of its first Shaker exhibit with a major retrospective: Community Industries of the Shakers: A New Look.

N Y S M

*For slides, please call 518/474-0079.