BOSTON, MASS.- On Feb. 13, 2025, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens Believers: Artists and the Shakers, a tightly conceived group exhibition revisiting The Quiet in the Land: Everyday Life, Contemporary Art and the Shakers, an exhibition presented at the ICA in 1998. The Quiet in the Land was organized by independent curator France Morin and brought to the ICA by Jill Medvedow at the beginning of her tenure as Ellen Matilda Poss Director. Believers reunites a core group of works first presented in The Quiet in the Land by artists Janine Antoni, Kazumi Tanaka, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nari Ward, and Chen Zhen—some of which have been remade for this exhibition—alongside more recent works by artists Jonathan Berger, Taylor Davis, Gordon Hall, Pallavi Sen, and Cauleen Smith. Believers considers how contemporary artists continue to derive inspiration from the utopian community’s vital experience as “ordinary people attempting to live an extraordinary life.” On view from Feb. 13 to Aug. 3, 2025, Believers: Artists and the Shakers is organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Mannion Family Curator, with Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator.

“The Quiet in the Land was a deeply meaningful project for me when I began my work at the ICA,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “I look forward to revisiting many of the artworks included in the 1998 exhibition and to discover how Shaker ideas around community, utility, and simplicity continue to resonate with artists today.”

The Quiet in the Land featured a dynamic body of works born out of an unorthodox residency initiated by Morin in 1996. During this residency, ten artists were invited to live, work, and worship in the only remaining active Shaker community located near New Gloucester in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. According to Morin, The Quiet in the Land set out “to explore the complex relationship between artistic practice and everyday life, as well as to define the spiritual impetus of the creative act,” with and through the art works inspired by the Shakers. Believers builds on the ways the earlier project “sought to probe conventional notions of gender, work, and spirituality, to redefine the making and experiencing of art, and to challenge the widespread belief that art and life exist in separate realms.”

Since arriving in America from England 250 years ago, the Shakers—a radical Christian sect—have occupied a unique and romantic place in American national identity and the public imaginary. Also known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, the Shakers ascribe to values and practices of celibacy, communal living, pacifism, shared property, and gender and racial equality, and they are widely recognized for their simple living and architectural style, music, and furniture design. The Shakers have captured the imagination of many artists since at least the early 20th century, when ideas about self-perfection, practicality, and the austere elegance associated with Shaker material culture and religious practice took hold. These ideas entered more strongly into the American consciousness following a string of influential exhibitions and books, many of them organized and authored by those outside of Shaker communities (what Shakers refer to as “the world”).

“Whereas artists were attracted initially to the sense of perfection and simplicity they associated with Shaker furniture, many artists today find in the Shakers a model for living otherwise at a time of radical social transformation,” said De Blois. “Long-held Shaker values like communal living, pacifism, shared property, and gender and racial equality are appealing for many artists—ideas that Believers traces from The Quiet in the Land to artists responding to the Shaker legacy in their work today.”

Believers presents selected works from The Quiet in the Land alongside more recent works by Jonathan Berger and Cauleen Smith. Taylor Davis, Gordon Hall, and Pallavi Sen have made new works for the exhibition. Examples include:

• Community Threshold (1997–2024), a found object sculpture by New York-based artist Nari Ward. Previously presented in The Quiet in the Land, this assemblage originally combined a child’s cradle, elements of a porch from Sabbathday Lake, and two banisters from a church in Harlem. The material conversation held by the sculpture between elements of the Shaker built environment and Harlem church banisters reflects Ward’s own consideration of his Baptist upbringing alongside his experience living with the Shakers. However, only a portion of the original sculpture survived after The Quiet in the Land. For Believers, Ward remade the sculpture around what remained, transforming it in the process by adding new materials such as children’s cots, bed springs, and lecterns. Elements of the sculpture are bound with strips of burlap that suggest techniques of Shaker basket making, while two washbasins with inset mirrors feature scattered soil recently collected from the grounds of Sabbathday Lake. Remaking the sculpture allowed the work to grow with him, mirroring the lasting impact that his time at Sabbathday Lake among the Shakers had on his life.

• Communion (1996/2025) by New York-based artist Kazumi Tanaka was made following her 1996 residency at Sabbathday Lake. Tanaka was inspired by the everyday rituals of communion, such as shared meals in the dining room of the dwelling house. Tanaka memorialized this experience in the form of an installation composed of two tables and a clock, all made meticulously by hand. Inlaid into the top of the tables—which evoke the separate tables for men and women in the dining room—are metal trays filled with water. The plates float on the surface of the water, evoking the presence of the Shakers sharing a meal, just as the ticking clock with no hands evokes the passage of time, which Tanaka observed passed “more carefully” at the village. Here, Tanaka also included an anamorphic door that sits permanently ajar. Conceived in 1996 but not shown until 2025, the door alludes to Shaker founder Mother Ann Lee’s sentiment that the Shakers should open the windows and doors to receive whoever will arrive, a spirit of openness and generosity Brother Arnold Hadd carries forward at Sabbathday Lake today.

• Pilgrim (2017) is a short film by Los Angeles-based filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith. Against the backdrop of a live recording of Alice Coltrane performing “One for the Father,” Smith combines ecstatic footage from three inspired sites: Alice Coltrane’s Sai Anantam Ashram (founded in 1983 though lost to a California wildfire in 2018); Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers (a collection of seventeen interconnected sculptural towers built between 1921 and 1954 in Los Angeles, and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990); and the Watervliet Shaker Village (the first Shaker settlement in America, established in 1776 in Albany County, New York). Presenting these three unique places on a continuum, Smith’s approach in Pilgrim traces lines between Shaker placemaking and other important sites of spiritual practice in America.

• In Jonathan Berger’s text-based, sculptural installation An Introduction to Nameless Love—Untitled (Brother Arnold Hadd, with Sarah Workneh), Brother Arnold Hadd of Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village was one of six protagonists interviewed on the subject of “nameless love,” a term the artist uses to describe nonromantic forms of love. After extensive conversations with Brother Arnold, the transcripts were edited and condensed by Sarah Workneh, Berger’s collaborator and the former codirector of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, located in Maine near Sabbathday Lake. Berger then cut the text letter by letter from tin and reassembled them into a wall-size, text-based sculpture with doors on either side—a reference to the Shaker separation of genders reflected in their architectural forms. In the text, Brother Arnold describes how, for the Shakers, labor is a spiritual expression of divine love. This labor of love is likewise expressed in Berger’s meticulously crafted sculpture.