wrote a print story for GQ on Shaker furniture:
https://www.gq.com/story/shaker-furnitures-lasting-influence-on-design
https://www.gq.com/story/shaker-furnitures-lasting-influence-on-design
https://www.gq.com/story/shaker-furnitures-lasting-influence-on-design
which was a pleasure to write and report… spoke to a bunch of folks who didn’t make the article cut. I spoke to Alyce Englund of The Met and David Schorsch, a dealer who knew so much about furniture it was inspiring…
Shaker is very beautiful but one of the nice things about it is, and which I alluded to in the story but wanted to spend a bit more time on here is that you can get a chair for decently cheap — in the few hundreds — if you go to the right auctions (which are a couple times a year, mostly on the East Coast….)… the issue with Shaker furniture is that there are a lot of knockoffs, obviously, but that the knockoffs have been in circulation for over a century, so they have the patina and wear that most fake things do not have…. I would never recommend that people only buy from retail and official establishments but it kind of needs to be the case here. Schorsch recommends Willis Henry and Skinner auction houses, they both have Shaker stuff for OK prices… he himself deals in museum-type pieces. The Met, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the American Museum in Bath (UK) have excellent exhibits to look over…
Also something that wasn’t addressed in the story for space constraints are Shaker spirit drawings BKA gift drawings:
which speak for themselves…. there’s a lot of talk about the spare nature of Shaker and how unadorned it is… I don’t know. The furniture takes up a lot of space. It just does it simply. These drawings are the Shakers’ most explicit expressions of their religious beliefs and since those beliefs run their lives (Shakers are volcel) it is no surprise the drawings are… busy. I believe mostly (if not all) who did these drawings were women…
I also saw this the other day:
Which is really great.
Thanks for reading.
Snake