A radical Christian sect led to America by Mother Ann Lee in 1774, the Shakers adopted a communal lifestyle dedicated to the principles of celibacy, pacifism, egalitarianism, and simple living. They brought about a utopian society based on gender and race equality.
Mariam Ghani, Erin Ellen Kelly, Maria Molteni and Cauleen Smith all refer to Shaker communal life in their meditations on the American landscape and imagination.
Using the grounds and the collection of Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts, Maria Molteni’s film, Sacred Sheets, “evokes and reawakens the spirit of Shaker routine.”
Shot at the Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, Mariam Ghani and Erin Ellen Kelly’s photograph and film series, When the Spirits Moved Them, They Moved, reveal “Shaker landscaping, architecture, song and dance as ways of organizing being-in-common”.
As in Cauleen Smith’s films, Pilgrim and Sojourner, the Shaker historic villages in New York, NY, appear as utopian ventures where American “people [came] together with intention and determination to build a world, systems, and cultures that are bigger than themselves.”
In conversation with art writer Julie Schneider, the artists will present their research-based artworks that revisit episodes in Shaker history, then share their fascinations for the Shaker gift drawings and the Era of manifestations. Drawing from artifacts on view in the exhibition Anything but Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic, this multi-part program will offer an opportunity to reflect on Shaker influence on American material culture, and discuss the possibilities that the sect’s lifestyle opens for us today.
About the speakers
Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work operates at the intersections of language, loss, migration, memory, and history. Her films, public projects, photographs, and installations have been presented and collected worldwide, notably in Times Square and the new Terminal C at LaGuardia Airport; the Guggenheim, New Museum, MoMA, Smithsonian and Metropolitan Museums; the CCCB in Barcelona, the Secession in Vienna, and Para/Site in Hong Kong; Documenta 13, the Dhaka Art Summit, and the Liverpool, Lahore, Yinchuan, and Sharjah Biennials; and the Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, SFFILM, DOC NYC, Sheffield Doc/Fest, BlackStar, Ji.hlava, and Ann Arbor film festivals. Museum solo shows include the St. Louis Art Museum, the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, the Schneider Museum of Art in Oregon, and the Queens Museum of Art in NYC. Ghani’s first feature film, the critically acclaimed documentary What We Left Unfinished, tells the mostly true story of five unfinished Afghan Communist films. It premiered at the 2019 Berlinale, was released theatrically in the US by Dekanalog, and had its streaming premiere on the Criterion Channel. Her second feature film, Dis-Ease, looks at the real consequences of how we fictionalize disease, and premieres in summer 2024.
Ghani is known for projects that engage with places, ideas, issues and institutions over long periods of time, often as part of long-term collaborations. These include: collaborations with the Endangered Language Alliance on data visualization murals for the Queens Museum and LaGuardia Airport (2015-16, 2022-23); critical, curatorial, conservation and creative work with the national film archive Afghan Films (2012-20), with support from the media archiving collective Pad.ma and a number of international art institutions; the video and performance series Performed Places, ongoing since 2006, in collaboration with choreographer Erin Ellen Kelly and composer Qasim Naqvi; and the experimental archive and discussion platform Index of the Disappeared, initiated with artist Chitra Ganesh in 2004, which has also become a vehicle for collaborations with other activists, archivists, artists, journalists, lawyers and scholars.
Ghani has received a number of fellowships, awards, grants, and residencies, most recently from the Graham Foundation, Field of Vision, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Wellcome Trust, the New York Public Library, Creative Capital, EMPAC, the 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles, the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. She also produces critical writing, organizes symposiums, and lectures widely, most recently for the Center for Arts and Society at Carnegie Mellon, the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, the HKW in Berlin, the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, the Mosaic Rooms and the Photographers Gallery in London, pad.ma in Mumbai, the Wende Museum in Los Angeles, DOC NYC Pro, Sundance Co/Lab, and Asia Art Archive, Rhizome, Triple Canopy, UnionDocs, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in NYC.
Ghani teaches film/video at Bennington College.
Erin Ellen Kelly creates and choreographs for on-site presentation, the stage, installations, video and photographs and presents in varied locations, within natural, liminal and constructed environments. Working with the belief in embodied intelligence she is interested in the relationships between the tangible and intangible. Through a process based approach the aim is for the body and its dance to explore subtle and nuanced relationships to surrounding environments and their inhabitants.
Her work has been developed through the support of residency programs that include the Camargo Foundation, Movement Research, LMCC at Governors’ Island, Banff Centre, Frida Hansen Haus, PARSE NOLA, SIren Arts as well as a CSA farming apprenticeship, and enhanced through collaborative practices. She was a MFA Teaching Fellowship at Bennington College and is currently a visiting assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Art.
Erin has presented work in various contexts, and through the support of institutions and festivals that include: The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Serpintine Slacker Gallery, The Speed Museum, The Bass Museum: Temporary / Contemporary Series, Rogaland Kunstsenter, Kusthaus Tacheles, Nacht&Nebel Festival Berlin, Sharjah Biennial9, Indianapolis Museum of Art, LPR at the Knockdown Center, Danspace, and the Queens Museum.
Maria Molteni (They/Them, b. 1983, Nashville) is a Massachusetts-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, mystic, and independent Shaker researcher of 17 years – since their first visit to the living Shakers in 2007. They descend from competitive square dancers, quilters and beekeepers who farmed Tennessee land just south of South Union Shaker Village (KY). Molteni is widely known for laying the foundations for the community-centered basketball court painting movement via their Cosmic Courts. But they pull from a wide range of historical and popular cultural contexts, picturing themself as a (meta)Physical-Ed coach for visionary movements and intentional communities. With backgrounds in painting, publication, dance and athletics, their practice blooms to incorporate deep research, embodied spirituality and collaboration with the living and the dead. They are a current member of Lake Pleasant (oldest Spiritualist community in MA) and serve on the board of the Golden Dome School for mystic artists. Their intuitive practice spans astrology, tarot, dreamwork, conchomancy and color magic.
Through residencies, pilgrimage, and independent research, Molteni has worked closely with the archives of most existing historic Shaker villages- particularly Canterbury (NH), Hancock (MA), Harvard and Shirley Shaker Villages (via Fruitlands Museum, MA), and South Union (KY). They have also conducted experiential research on the sites and grounds of Sabbathday Lake (Maine), Mount Lebanon (NY), and Watervliet (NY). With a focus on the Era of Manifestations, particularly Gift Drawings and Mountain Meetings, Molteni’s interest in the Shakers includes their socio-spiritual philosophies, ordered + free-form dance styles, spirit communication, celestial observations, and matriarchal + queer studies lenses on Shaker culture. Molteni’s most notable projects created in conversation with Shaker studies include: Shaker Work-Out video series, Great Awakenings/ Radical Road Trip pilgrimage hosted with Now Age Travel, and the 2021 film Sacred Sheets, created in collaboration with Allison Halter. This fall and winter Molteni will be offering several lectures and longer form classes on the Shaker Era of Manifestations/ Gift Drawings through AFAM, the Viktor Wynd Museum/Last Tuesday Society (London), and Morbid Anatomy.
Molteni has exhibited at numerous galleries and museums as well as basements, meadows, sidewalks and seascapes across the globe. Two museum solo shows are currently on view: Beautiful Seven, through November 7 at San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (CA) and Soft Score, through January 13 at Fuller Craft Museum (MA). Past institutions include: The Momentary Contemporary Art Museum (Bentonville, AR), ICA and MFA Boston, Project Rowhouses (Houston), Den Frei Contemporary Art Center (Copenhagen), NGBK (Berlin), Museum of Design (Atlanta), A +A Gallery (Venice, Italy).
Cauleen Smith was born in 1967 in Riverside, California. She received her BA, in 1991, from San Francisco State University, and her MFA, in 1998, from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2007, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine. In 2020 the Whitney Museum of American Art presented Cauleen Smith: Mutualities, which marked the artist‘s first solo exhibition in New York and was presented in conjunction with the installation Cauleen Smith: Signals from Here on the High Line. In 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, organized the traveling exhibition Cauleen Smith: Give It or Leave It, which traveled to the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, in 2019, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 2021. She has also been included in the Whitney Biennial (2017) and Yorkshire Sculpture International (2019).
As a writer, editor, journalist, and photographer, Julie Schneider produces stories about arts and culture, health and science, entrepreneurship, tech, lifestyle, community, and the weird and the wonderful. She has served in staff editorial, content, copy, and community roles for Etsy, Patreon, Miro, CreativeMornings, and The Midst. She currently freelance for arts and culture publications, an online marketplace, tech companies that make tools for creators, and telehealth companies.
Her writing has appeared in various print and digital publications, including Hyperallergic, The Center Magazine, Taproot Magazine, An Injustice! Magazine, The Midst, MiroBlog, Patreon’s Creator Hub, Chronicle Books’ blog, NYCity News Service, Northwestern Mutual, The Blossom (by the Endometriosis Foundation of America), Flow Magazine, the Etsy Journal, and elsewhere. Her words and visual works have also appeared in several craft and creativity books, including Bibliocraft by Jessica Pigza, Handmade Graphics by Anna Wray, 1-2-3 Quilt by Ellen Luckett Baker, and 1,000 Ideas for Creative Reuse by Garth Johnson.
Images:
Left: Maria Molteni and Allison Halter, Sacred Sheets, film, 2021, 18 min. Courtesy of the artists.
Middle: Mariam Ghani & Erin Ellen Kelly, Meeting House, Morning, from the series When the Spirits Moved Them, They Moved, dye transfer print on dibond, 2019
Right: Mariam Ghani & Erin Ellen Kelly, Jump, from the series When the Spirits Moved Them, They Moved, dye transfer print on dibond, 2019; right: Cauleen Smith, Pilgrim, 2017, digital video, 07:41 min., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the SJ Weiler Fund, 2020.54.2, © 2020, Cauleen Smith
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