{"id":313068,"date":"2025-11-25T16:26:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T16:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/313068\/"},"modified":"2025-11-25T16:26:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T16:26:08","slug":"frances-mcdormand-on-her-adult-sized-cradle-art-project-its-not-performative-its-experiential-frances-mcdormand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/313068\/","title":{"rendered":"Frances McDormand on her adult-sized cradle art project: \u2018It\u2019s not performative, it\u2019s experiential\u2019 | Frances McDormand"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The actor Frances McDormand\u2019s<\/a> 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<\/a> at the opening of an exhibition featuring adult-sized cradles.<\/p>\n

McDormand\u2019s and Bocanegra\u2019s 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\u2019s Second Appearing.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. But the group is gaining fresh attention.<\/p>\n

A new film, The Testament of Ann Lee<\/a>, 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<\/a> gallery, highlights how the Shakers, who embraced celibacy and often sheltered more elders than children, developed a culture of end-of-life care.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere\u2019s a community where you are saved all the possessiveness, jealousy, enviousness \u2013 all the things that come along with carnal relations between men and women, men and men, women and women,\u201d McDormand says from New York in a group Zoom call.<\/p>\n

Photograph: Keith Lubow<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you subtract that, how much more successful can a community be? Sometimes I get frustrated with the idea of, \u2018Oh, they only lasted so long as they didn\u2019t have children. They weren\u2019t having sex; of course they weren\u2019t successful.\u2019 In fact, they were successful for 200 years because of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bocanegra<\/a>, who co-conceived and co-curated the exhibition, chimes in: \u201cThat\u2019s what makes the cradle such an interesting object, because it\u2019s something we associate with an infant and yet, for the Shakers, it was used more for adults and for the end of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Sharon Koomler, collections manager at the Shaker Museum<\/a> in Chatham, New York, which drew on its archive for the show, observes: \u201cThe Shakers weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom a former nursing background, I can tell you that rocking helps to prevent pressure sores because you\u2019re not leaving anybody on one pressure point, so there\u2019s a practical reason for it as well as the soothing emotional reason.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jerry Grant<\/a>, the museum\u2019s director of library and collections, says: \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

McDormand\u2019s fascination with the Shakers grew out of a performance she gave for the Wooster Group<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

McDormand explains: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photograph: Keith Lubow<\/p>\n

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 \u201clast lullaby\u201d from a Shaker spiritual about eternal life.<\/p>\n

Asked how her career as a performer translates to the confines of a gallery, McDormand replies: \u201cWell, I\u2019m 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\u2019re trying to make it clear that people aren\u2019t coming to a performance. It\u2019s not performative; it\u2019s more experiential.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bocanegra adds: \u201cWe 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\u2019re hoping that the longer you stay, the more you get out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Shakers were born in Manchester in Britain<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

The Shakers were dedicated to pacifism, natural health and hygiene. Their philosophy is encapsulated in sayings such as, \u201cHands to work, hearts to God\u201d and \u201cDo your work as if you had a thousand years to live but as if you knew you might die tomorrow.\u201d This focus on durable, useful craftsmanship, rather than decoration, resulted in an aesthetic of spare beauty.<\/p>\n

McDormand says: \u201cIf you look at Japanese design, you look at Scandinavian design, you look at mid-century modern, you look at early American, it\u2019s not about decoration, it\u2019s about utility. But because of that and because of the attention that\u2019s given to it, it ends up being beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 1910. Photograph: Courtesy Shaker Museum, Chatham NY<\/p>\n

Grant chips in: \u201cPeople will say, \u2018I need to simplify my life.\u2019 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\u2019s a lesson that we can always learn. It\u2019s not about just getting rid of the stuff in your house, it\u2019s about what\u2019s inside.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Shakers were also highly entrepreneurial and self-sufficient. A surprising discovery in the museum archive was a 1960s Barbie doll<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

McDormand reflects: \u201cFor 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The actor and producer adds: \u201cI like to call us Shaker-adjacent. There\u2019s many of us that are Shaker-adjacent. We haven\u2019t been thoroughly able to embrace the theology, necessarily, but certainly the ethos and the community spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n