Among the Shaker items on display at the Portland Museum of Art as part of “Gather Up the Fragments: The Andrews Shaker Collection’’ are (clockwise from above) a wooden storage chest, a basket, a rocking chair, a pocket handkerchief, and a pail. The items are examples of the Shakers’ dedication to the simplicity of design and construction.
(PHOTOS BY MICHAEL FREDERICKS)
art REVIEW
Portland show is a study in simplicity by design
Among the Shaker items on display at the Portland Museum of Art as part of “Gather Up the Fragments: The Andrews Shaker Collection’’ are (clockwise from above) a wooden storage chest, a basket, a rocking chair, a pocket handkerchief, and a pail. The items are examples of the Shakers’ dedication to the simplicity of design and construction.
(PHOTOS BY MICHAEL FREDERICKS)
In the 1920s, Edward and Faith Andrews began collecting chairs, tables, clothes, and other items created over the previous century by Shaker communities in New England. Today, we revere the Shakers for the way they lived and for the things they left behind, which can seem so simple, so humble, so lovingly made - in short, so virtuous, that they stand as a permanent rebuke to the way we live now. There’s a marvelous show at the Portland Museum of Art: ”Gather Up the Fragments: The Andrews Shaker Collection,”
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