Shaker Museum Plans Optimistic and Dynamic Expansion
The Museum has announced that it has acquired a building in downtown Chatham, New York. Annabelle Selldorf and Selldorf Architects were brought on to create a new, permanent facility in which to exhibit its comprehensive collection of more than 18,000 pieces of Shaker material culture and accompanying archives. Thomas Woltz and Nelson Byrd Woltz will be the project’s landscape architects.
Like the collection itself, the physical museum will embody Shaker values of inclusion, innovation and equality to create an institution responsive to the needs of the community in Chatham, Columbia County and the surrounding Hudson Valley. The $15 million project is expected to break ground in 2021 and be completed in 2023. To date, $6.3 million has been raised, which includes a leadership gift of nearly $3 million from Columbia Country resident Jack Shear. The museum will continue to own and manage the historic Shaker Village at Mount Lebanon, which was the largest and most successful utopian communal society in America for 160 years from 1787 to 1947.
This new Shaker Museum illustrates a radical enthusiasm for the notion of community and its power to transform. The design of the building will be driven by many things, among them a belief in the importance of live, in-person convening. Although this is hard to imagine in our current moment of social distancing, being in community is as old as the human race and the bedrock of Shaker beliefs. Their legacy offers a roadmap for creating sustainable, meaningful lives through cooperation.