NEW YORK, Dec. 12 -- One of the rarest categories of Americana are the "gift drawings" of the Shakers, a 19th-century religious sect that has less than a dozen living members today.
These drawings were not just art, but supernatural messages said to be passed on along with "gift songs" to members of the utopian sect by its founder, "Sister" Ann Lee (1736-1784), and early Shaker "saints" after their deaths.
Whatever their origin -- worldly or otherworldly -- the drawings are delicately beautiful and decidedly mystical.
Eighty of the 200 gift drawings and songs that are known to have survived are on display at the Drawing Center, a SoHo gallery and educational facility. The show has been organized by an independent curator, France Morin, in association with the Armand Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The gift drawings are among the least known products of Shaker culture, which thrived in colonies from Maine and Massachusetts to Ohio and Kentucky. Their furniture, clothing, storage boxes, and a variety of handicrafts and inventions, including the clothing pin, are more familiar to collectors than these intricate tinted drawings that have much in common with samplers of the period and Pennsylvania Dutch "fraktur" painting.
Most of the drawings date from the early 1800s to the 1850s when they stopped being made. According to Morin, they were considered sacred by the Shaker communities, and many were destroyed rather than let them fall into the hands of the World's People, as non-Shakers were called, when the communities began closing down in the 20th century.
Sister Ann, who must have been a woman of considerable charisma and spiritual fervor, was hounded out of her native England for the unorthodox religious teachings of her United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming. She found haven in the United States in 1774, settling in New England and founding communities that held property in common.
These communities were rural and agricultural where the sexes were housed separately and celibacy strictly enforced. Since the Shakers produced no children of their own, they relied on conversion for new members and this often brought them into conflict with non-Shaker neighbors who opposed members of their families joining the sect.
Sister Ann, a blacksmith's illiterate daughter, professed to be the female embodiment of Christ and preached His imminent Second Coming and the end of the world. She was preparing her followers, who reached a peak of 6,000 in eight states in the 1840s, for Paradise, and there wasn't much time for such extraneous activities as sex.
After she died at 48, her followers testified to her presence at worship services, which included palsied, ecstatic dancing that gave the Shakers their nickname. She made ghostly appearances to some of her followers, usually women, who were her "instruments" in making the drawings and writing the hymns that were passed on to the community at large.
One such instrument, Hannah Cohoon, is justly famous among Americana specialists for her splendidly decorative drawings. Her best-known work, "Tree of Light, or Blazing Tree," is on display, depicting a slender, many-branched tree with fiery leaves. Another work by Cohoon, who joined the Shaker colony in Pittsfield, Mass., in 1817, is "The Bower of Mulberry Trees," showing a table set with a Shaker banquet.
Another talented Shaker artist, Polly Collins, is represented by "Emblem of the Heavenly Sphere," a drawing of scores of portrait heads stacked in neat rows including Biblical prophets, Sister Ann and early leaders of the sect, and Christopher Columbus, the only secular figure. Was Collins suggesting that Sister Ann and Columbus had something in common as discoverers of a New World?
Collins did not include a text to explain this, but some of the drawings not only have texts with spirit messages but are all text, sometimes written in "tongues" in the Biblical sense in characters that resemble Hebrew and Arabic. These texts are decorated with pictograms and geometric designs that probably had occult meaning to the Shaker cognoscenti.
Masonic symbols were adapted by another artist, Polly Jane Reed, in a two-sided drawing titled "A Type of Mother Hannah's Pocket Handkerchief" that was meant to look like a handkerchief.
Other drawings are cut in the shape of hearts and fans. One of the most impressive works in the show, by an anonymous artist, is in the form of a map and is labeled "Spiritual Map: The Holy City." It provides a bird's eye view of heaven in the form of a street map and is accompanied by a guide book with the addresses of such worthies as "the prophesying angels of Eternal Mother Wisdom."
Several volumes of gift hymns, which are said to have numbered in the thousands, are included in the show, which runs through Jan. 19. The most famous of these hymns is "Simple Gifts," which was incorporated by Aaron Copland in his composition "Appalachian Spring."
Important collections of Shaker furniture, crafts and memorabilia relating to their contributions to farm machinery and the packaging of seeds and medicinal herbs can be seen at the Hancock Shaker Museum in Pittsfield, the Shaker Museum at Auburn, Ky., and the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Mass. Content: 01009000 01019000 01020000
