Heavenly Visions: Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs

Heavenly Visions was the first comprehensive exhibition of Shaker gift drawings and manuscripts since 1979. Curated by art historian France Morin, the approximately 130 drawings, song manuscripts, and other texts inspired by the unique spiritual practices and beliefs of the American religious community known as the Shakers that comprised this exhibition came from major public and private collections around the United States. Some of those historical museums included the Shaker Hancock Village in Pittsfield, MA, the United Society of Shakers in New Gloucester, ME, and the Shaker Museum and Library at Old Chatham, NY, the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Western Reserve, Cleveland, and others.

The works were mostly dated to a period known as Mother Ann's Work or the Era of Manifestations, between 1837 and 1860, which was characterized by, among other activities, an increase in ecstatic worship, which could take the form of trance behaviors such as singing, dancing, whirling in place, and speaking in tongues. The Shakers considered all activities as spiritual gifts, received from Mother Ann or other Believers from the spirit world. During that period, the gift drawings and songs came as a form of encouragement, comfort, or warning in the spiritual lives of Shakers. Spiritually attuned mediums known as "instruments" received these gifts while engaged in trance states. The instruments themselves, or other Believers, would then record these gifts, to pass along to the intended recipient.

Though most would classify these works as drawings, the Shakers did not consider them in that way. To them they were pen and ink texts, spirit writing, heart blessings, song manuscripts, tokens, love, hymnals, books of visions, and manuscripts. The Shakers had no articulated conception of art, and according to the Shaker's Millennial Laws of 1845, which defined codes of behavior and worship, "pictures or paintings set in frames, with glass before them" were expressly prohibited. The aesthetic qualities of the exhibited work were not confined by the traditional ideas of austerity associated with Shaker design. There were many lush and vibrant renderings, enhanced by flourishes, details, and, in some cases, highly ornate script.