A small-town police chief of plainspoken decency in Fargo. A working-class mother driven to seek justice for her daughter in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. A modest, resilient woman finding dignity in life on the road in Nomadland.
The actor Frances McDormand’s three Oscar-winning performances display rare versatility but have empathy at their core. But qualities were on display last week when she joined the conceptual artist Suzanne Bocanegra at the opening of an exhibition featuring adult-sized cradles.
McDormand’s and Bocanegra’s were the hands that rocked the cradle of Nancy Buchanan, 79, and 94-year-old Barbara T Smith, two doyennes of the Los Angeles art scene before Shaker lemon pie was served at Cradled, an exhibition inspired by the Shakers, a Christian sect formally known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing.
The Shakers are best known for their simple, communal lifestyle and ecstatic worship that included dancing and shaking (hence the name). Today the last active Shaker community in the world is located at Sabbath Day Lake in Maine, consisting of three members. But the group is gaining fresh attention.
A new film, The Testament of Ann Lee, stars Amanda Seyfried as the woman who brought the Shakers from Britain to the American colonies in the 18th century. Cradled, at the Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles gallery, highlights how the Shakers, who embraced celibacy and often sheltered more elders than children, developed a culture of end-of-life care.
“Here’s a community where you are saved all the possessiveness, jealousy, enviousness – all the things that come along with carnal relations between men and women, men and men, women and women,” McDormand says from New York in a group Zoom call.
Photograph: Keith Lubow
“If you subtract that, how much more successful can a community be? Sometimes I get frustrated with the idea of, ‘Oh, they only lasted so long as they didn’t have children. They weren’t having sex; of course they weren’t successful.’ In fact, they were successful for 200 years because of that.”
Bocanegra, who co-conceived and co-curated the exhibition, chimes in: “That’s what makes the cradle such an interesting object, because it’s something we associate with an infant and yet, for the Shakers, it was used more for adults and for the end of life.”
The show features four Shaker cradles on loan from Shaker museums spanning the country from New England to Kentucky. Each is paired with a tableau of Shaker rocking chairs and woven baskets filled with projects so that visitors can take part in the literal and figurative act of mending, an activity at the heart of Shaker values.
Sharon Koomler, collections manager at the Shaker Museum in Chatham, New York, which drew on its archive for the show, observes: “The Shakers weren’t the only ones in the world using an adult cradle but we do find that it speaks to their tender care of people from the cradle to the grave, so to speak, from youth all the way through their advancing years and in their infirmities. It is a way to soothe someone.
“From a former nursing background, I can tell you that rocking helps to prevent pressure sores because you’re not leaving anybody on one pressure point, so there’s a practical reason for it as well as the soothing emotional reason.”
Jerry Grant, the museum’s director of library and collections, says: “It was a two-person activity, so it meant that if you were being rocked there was somebody with you. When you had Shakers who were ill or dying, they were not left alone. The cradle gives an opportunity for both people to have purpose in that relationship.”
McDormand’s fascination with the Shakers grew out of a performance she gave for the Wooster Group, a New York experimental theater company, based on an album of five Shaker women singing songs passed down through oral history. She became acquainted with Koomler and Grant of the Shaker Museum and staged a forerunner of the show at its pop-up gallery in Kinderhook, New York.
McDormand explains: “I was drawn to the adult-sized cradles in the collection because it was something that was provocative in its size and in its use for the infirm and elderly. I was honoured to be asked to create something at the Kinderhook space. I had worked with Suzanne on some of her art lectures and she was one of the most interesting and funny conceptual artists I knew.”
Photograph: Keith Lubow
The exhibition is designed to be an immersive, multi-sensory environment. Bocanegra and McDormand worked with the composer David Lang, and Skip Lievsay and Paul Umstron, sound editors, on an end-of-life lullaby that resonates throughout. Lang adapted the text for his “last lullaby” from a Shaker spiritual about eternal life.
Asked how her career as a performer translates to the confines of a gallery, McDormand replies: “Well, I’m trying to do that as little as possible in my life, period, and also especially in this space. We enter the space and work is what informs the space, not performance. We’re trying to make it clear that people aren’t coming to a performance. It’s not performative; it’s more experiential.”
Bocanegra adds: “We hope that people will feel free to be comfortable and sit. The audience decides how much time they want to spend with the piece and we try to make this installation the kind of thing where you felt like you were welcome and you could sit with it and you could contemplate and we’re hoping that the longer you stay, the more you get out of it.”
The Shakers were born in Manchester in Britain but were formally established in America after Mother Ann Lee and a small group of followers arrived in 1774. The movement flourished for more than 200 years.
The Shakers were dedicated to pacifism, natural health and hygiene. Their philosophy is encapsulated in sayings such as, “Hands to work, hearts to God” and “Do your work as if you had a thousand years to live but as if you knew you might die tomorrow.” This focus on durable, useful craftsmanship, rather than decoration, resulted in an aesthetic of spare beauty.
McDormand says: “If you look at Japanese design, you look at Scandinavian design, you look at mid-century modern, you look at early American, it’s not about decoration, it’s about utility. But because of that and because of the attention that’s given to it, it ends up being beautiful.”
A cabinet card photograph of Shaker sisters Martha Jane Anderson, Grace Bowers, and Anna White in the North Family Sewing Room, Mount Lebanon, New York, circa 1890 – 1910. Photograph: Courtesy Shaker Museum, Chatham NY
Grant chips in: “People will say, ‘I need to simplify my life.’ The Shakers would say simplicity is a singleness of heart. Making your life simpler was to keep yourself simply focused on one thing and not let it get all cluttered up. That’s a lesson that we can always learn. It’s not about just getting rid of the stuff in your house, it’s about what’s inside.”
The Shakers were also highly entrepreneurial and self-sufficient. A surprising discovery in the museum archive was a 1960s Barbie doll dressed in a custom Shaker outfit and created as a product for sale. At the same time they practiced charity, always planting a surplus to provide for their neighbours and those in need.
McDormand reflects: “For some reason, people think religious sects are constantly seeking funds or taking a vow of poverty, but they they took care of themselves very well with seed collections and furniture and a lot of different things. One of them was doll clothes and so we saw one of the first Barbie dolls dressed in a Shaker outfit, which was exciting for us, being of our age group.”
The actor and producer adds: “I like to call us Shaker-adjacent. There’s many of us that are Shaker-adjacent. We haven’t been thoroughly able to embrace the theology, necessarily, but certainly the ethos and the community spirit.”