How can a free church founded in 18th-century America continue to inspire generations of artists, architects, and designers around the world?
The Shakers: A World in the Making, on view from June 7 to September 28, 2025, at the Vitra Design Museum, seeks to answer this question by looking beyond the formal qualities of Shaker objects to reveal a worldview in which design was inseparable from spiritual life.
The Shakers, a religious community that originated in England and migrated to the United States in 1774, built a society grounded in values such as community, equality, shared labor, and strict spiritual discipline. Every object, space, and gesture within their settlements carried a meaning that went beyond function. Design was a form of prayer, work a liturgical act, and beauty a natural expression of moral order.
Organized in collaboration with the Shaker Museum in Chatham, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Wüstenrot Foundation, the exhibition brings together over 150 original objects from the world’s most significant Shaker collection.
Furniture, architectural elements, tools, and everyday goods are presented alongside newly commissioned works by seven contemporary artists and designers. Each offers a distinct yet coherent perspective on the Shaker legacy, addressing current concerns in design such as inclusivity, sustainability, spirituality, and collective production.
The exhibition design, conceived by the duo Formafantasma, moves between historical and contemporary registers without nostalgia, conveying the Shaker world’s ethical and aesthetic rigor through a restrained and attentive visual language.
The exhibition unfolds across four thematic sections, each titled with a quotation from Shaker writings. Words, like objects, are treated as living material, revealing the underlying fabric of a culture in which thought, action, and form reflect one another.
Visitors enter the Shaker world through The Place Just Right, a section that explores how architecture and spatial organization responded to a desire for both inner and collective harmony. Archival and contemporary photographs, a staircase from a Shaker home, and a long communal bench illustrate the structure of a celibate yet socially connected life, built around codified relationships, defined roles, and shared routines. A radio used by the Canterbury community underscores how the Shakers, though withdrawn from secular society, were not opposed to innovation. Sound—a key element in their ecstatic dance practice—is evoked through original musical instruments and a video work by Reggie Wilson that weaves together Shaker sacred gestures with African American movement traditions.
The next section, When We Find a Good Thing, We Stick To It, focuses on the origins of Shaker design in the need for order, repetition, and precision. Lightweight chairs, modular chests, work tables, and garments sewn to strict standards reflect a worldview where beauty was not excluded but subordinated to function and moral intent. A contribution by artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed, inspired by the writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson—an African American woman and influential figure within the movement—opens a poetic and critical space for considering how closed systems might be adapted to non-canonical experiences.
In Every Force Evolves a Form, the exhibition explores the Shaker paradox of communal isolation paired with economic engagement. Oval boxes, handmade brooms, tools, and small goods sold in local markets reflect a pragmatism that anticipated many principles of modern design. Works by Christien Meindertsma, who reinterprets Shaker basket-making traditions through a biodegradable coffin, and Finnegan Shannon, who examines accessibility in design and space, propose new ways of understanding Shaker attentiveness to the body and individual needs.
The final section, I Don’t Want to Be Remembered as a Chair, challenges the aesthetic reductionism often associated with the Shakers. Objects such as gift drawings, spiritual images created by Shaker sisters between 1830 and 1850 during visionary experiences, and a large embroidery by Chris Halstrøm, in which each stitch is conceived as a prayer, reflect the emotional and spiritual depth of this culture.
Exhibition Title: The Shakers: A World in the Making
Dates: June 7 – September 28, 2025
Where: Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany
Website: design-museum.de
- Catalogue: The Shakers: A World in the Making
