Americana week in New York City.(Current and coming)(Calendar)

An incredibly valuable resource for scholars of Shaker history and the many fans of the sect's furniture and other products is the Shaker Museum and Library in Old Chatham, New York, which is home to one of the most important, largest, and best-documented collections of Shaker materials in the world. Visiting the museum and library, located in the scenic Taconic region in Columbia County, is a unique experience. The collections are housed in a series of old barns, chicken coops, and other buildings, with spaces arranged either as re-creations of Shaker workshops and rooms or as more traditional museum displays.

The first building one encounters, the great barn, is filled with rows of chairs, sideboards, and chests. Another space holds nothing but heating stoves. As in a similar display filled with seemingly dozens of chairs, visitors are able to see the form's evolution, the differences between manufacturing villages, and the techniques of construction. The museum's recent acquisition of the ten remaining buildings that make up the so-called North Family property at Mount Lebanon Shaker Village, located in New Lebanon, New York, less than fifteen miles from the museum, unites the collection with what was once a center of Shaker life.

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The Shaker Museum was founded in 1950 by John S. Williams in collaboration with Shaker leaders from the communities of Mount Lebanon; Canterbury, New Hampshire; Sabbathday Lake, Maine; and Hancock, Massachusetts. Williams was deeply interested in the group, whose population had declined significantly from its peak during the mid- to late nineteenth century, and he recognized the need to preserve their life, work, and religious history. Working closely with his Shaker associates, he began collecting objects from every facet of Shaker life, including machinery, tools, household furnishings, textiles, baskets, buckets, books, and manuscript materials. The museum's holdings grew quickly; 70 percent of the collection, which today totals some forty-seven thousand objects, artifacts, and archival records, was acquired between 1950 and 1962 alone, most of it directly from Shaker communities.

This month visitors to the fifty-fourth annual Winter Antiques Show at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City will have the opportunity to view nearly one hundred of the finest objects from the Shaker Museum and Library, which comprise this year's loan exhibition. Given the immense popularity of these materials, it may come as a surprise to note that this is the first major exhibition of a Shaker collection in New York City in more than a decade. Entitled An Eye Toward Perfection, the loan exhibition brings together quintessentially Shaker chairs, chests, and pails, as well as a rare knitted wool, cotton, and linen rug made by Elvira Hulett in Hancock, about 1895 and the tailors counter of about 1815 (seen below) that was originally built directly into the walls of a tailoring workshop at the Shaker village in Canterbury.

A series of lectures that complement the exhibition will take place at the Armory during the course of the antiques show, which runs from January 18 to 27 and features seventy-five top dealers in American, English, European, and Asian fine and decorative arts. The show's net proceeds benefit the East Side House Settlement, a social services institution in the South Bronx. The catalogue of the antiques show contains an essay on the loan exhibition written by Sharon Duane Koomler, the director of the Shaker Museum and Library. It may be obtained by telephoning 718-292-7392 or through the Web site ...