A radically different way of living, expressed through design. The Shakers: A World in the Making is the first major traveling exhibition to place extraordinary Shaker objects alongside the contemporary artists and designers they continue to inspire. Image: Oval box on a workbench, New Lebanon, NY, 2024. © Vitra Design Museum / Alex Lesage, courtesy Shaker Museum, Chatham, New York
Hello, my friend,
I have been thinking about what we carry forward.
Sometimes deliberately.
Sometimes without realizing it.
Knowledge passed from one person to another. A way of making something. A story. A memory. The habits of a lifetime. An object entrusted to our care.
And sometimes, years later, we discover that something we have carried quietly has become part of who we are.
This has been an unusual week at the gallery.
After an unexpected closure, we are reopening. The artwork is safe. The walls are drying.
And on Saturday, photographs Richard made at Celilo Falls nearly seventy years ago will finally meet the public.
I have spent months preparing for that moment.
Now that it is here, I find that I do not have much more to say about it.
I am simply grateful the photographs are here.
A World in the Making
At the Milwaukee Art Museum, The Shakers: A World in the Making opens September 25.
The exhibition brings together more than 150 historic Shaker objects and contemporary installations, placing furniture, tools, textiles, and domestic objects beside work by artists and designers who continue to find meaning in Shaker ideas of craftsmanship, utility, shared labor, and intentional design.
I am drawn to the idea that an object can carry more than function.
A chair carries knowledge of wood.
A woven textile carries knowledge of fiber and hand.
A vessel carries decisions about proportion, weight, surface, and use.
We do not have to reproduce the past exactly in order to learn from it.
Sometimes what is carried forward is not the object itself.
It is the understanding behind it.
That thought felt particularly close this week because three new figure sculptures by John Van Dreal arrived at the gallery.
Porcelain.
Gold leaf.
Walnut.
They are entirely contemporary, yet the materials carry histories much older than the work itself.
They will make their debut here Saturday, quietly sharing the gallery with photographs made seventy years earlier.
I like that very much.
Conceived by Anthony Guerrée as a dialogue between contemporary decorative arts and the sculptural language of Antoine Bourdelle, Contrepoint draws on various artisanal techniques and combines materials such as wood, glass, textiles, and mixed clay. © Bourdelle Museum
Influence Without Imitation
At the Musée Bourdelle in Paris, designer Anthony Guerrée has created Contrepoint, a temporary dialogue between contemporary decorative arts and the work of sculptor Antoine Bourdelle.
Through wood, stained glass, textile, terracotta, and furniture, Guerrée responds to Bourdelle’s forms without trying to reproduce them. The installation moves through the museum’s historic spaces, placing contemporary objects among Bourdelle’s sculptures and allowing colored light, material, and form to create new relationships between them. The installation continues through September 27.
That distinction interests me:
influence without imitation.
We can carry something forward without copying it.
We can inherit an idea and allow it to change.
Perhaps that is how a tradition remains alive.
Not by repeating the past perfectly.
By understanding it well enough to make something new.
MODA's newest exhibition traces salt from the terraced salt ponds of Peru to the ancient mines of Austria, from kitschy salt-and-pepper shakers to the Morton's girl who has been walking in the rain since 1914. © Museum of Design Atlanta
A Pinch of Salt
And then there is salt.
The Museum of Design Atlanta is currently presenting SALT: A Design Story, an exhibition devoted to one of the most ordinary and consequential materials on earth.
Salt shaped trade routes and cities. Humans developed extraordinary systems to extract, transport, tax, preserve, and store it. The exhibition moves from Bolivia’s mirrored salt flats and Ethiopian mineral landscapes to ancient mines, small-batch salt makers, an underground cathedral carved within Poland’s centuries-old Wieliczka Salt Mine, and a tasting bar filled with salts from around the world.
All of that history.
All of that landscape.
All of that human ingenuity.
And eventually:
a pinch between the fingers.
Something placed on the table.
Something tasted.
I love that change in scale.
It is easy to overlook the things we encounter every day.
Sometimes the ordinary becomes extraordinary only after we learn how much it carries.
From the Gallery
Tomorrow evening, Richard’s Celilo Falls photographs will be seen together publicly for the first time.
Nearly seventy years have passed since he stood beside the Columbia River with two cameras and two rolls of color film.
I have had the privilege of carrying the photographs this far.
Now they belong, in another sense, to everyone who comes to see them.
That may be one of the beautiful things about stewardship.
Eventually, what we care for has to be allowed back into the world.
What I’m Carrying With Me This Week
We carry forward art.
We carry forward knowledge.
We carry forward memories.
We carry forward craft.
We carry forward relationships.
We carry forward what others entrusted to us.
And sometimes we carry forward parts of ourselves we did not fully understand until later.
What we carry forward becomes part of what comes next.
If something here brought someone to mind, please feel free to share this letter with them.
Have a fabulous weekend.
Christina
Christina Stefani
Founder, House of Stefani