Shaker Shorts: The Quiet in the Land and Sacred Sheet

1998, 29:33 min, color, sound

Created in conjunction with a 1998 exhibition at the ICA, The Quiet in the Land documents an unorthodox artist residency while also painting a picture of the Christian sect the Shakers, known for practices of celibacy, communal living, pacifism, shared property, and gender and racial equality, along with simple living, architecture, music, and furniture design.

In 1996, curator France Morin invited ten artists to live, work, and worship in the only remaining active Shaker community, located in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. In agreeing to host the artists, the Shakers insisted that the artists participate in the village’s daily activities.

The residency yielded a dynamic body of works featured in the exhibition The Quiet in the Land: Everyday Life, Contemporary Art, and the Shakers, curated by Morin and presented at the ICA in 1998. According to Morin, the works gathered in The Quiet in the Land aimed “to explore the complex relationship between artistic practice and everyday life, as well as to define the spiritual impetus of the creative act.”

The ICA’s current exhibition, Believers: Artists and the Shakers, reunites a core group of artworks from that exhibition alongside more recent works to consider how contemporary artists derive inspiration from the utopian community’s vital experience as “ordinary people attempting to live an extraordinary life.”

Directed by Allison Halter and Maria Molteni

Cinematography by Gabe Elder

2023, 17:42 min, color, sound

Sacred Sheets, titled after Gift Drawings made by Shaker sisters during their 19th century “Era of Manifestations” (aka “Mother’s Work”), translates the imagery and calligraphic spirit writing of these inspired works into a colorful cut-paper floor drawing. Shifting light marks a day’s passage and frames a ritualized space clearing, evoking and reawakening the spirit of women’s creative labor. Performances by the artists revisit a fruitful historic period for femme inspiration and agency through intimate observations of Shaker ephemera and the natural world.

Allison Halter is a conceptual artist and witch. Using performance, video, sound, and photography, Halter explores themes of physical and psychic accumulation and calls into question audience expectations. Repetitive actions hint at mysterious prior events. The viewer must extrapolate the significance of these proliferating gestures, which take on a deeper emotional charge as they slowly and inexorably pile up.

Maria Molteni is a Massachusetts-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, mystic, and independent Shaker researcher since their first visit to the living Shakers in 2007. They descend from competitive square dancers, quilters and beekeepers who farmed Tennessee land near South Union Shaker Village. With formal backgrounds in painting, publication, dance, and athletics, their practice blooms to incorporate research, embodied spirituality and collaboration with the living and the dead.  

Molteni has worked closely with the archives of most existing historic Shaker villages- particularly Canterbury (NH), Hancock (MA), Harvard and Shirley Shaker Villages, and South Union (KY), including experiential research on the grounds of Sabbathday Lake (Maine), Mount Lebanon (NY), and Watervliet (NY). In addition to short essays, Molteni has offered Shaker-related lectures and programs through the American Folk Art Museum (NY), Viktor Wynd Museum/Last Tuesday Society (London), Shannon Taggart’s Lily Dale Symposium (NY), Fruitlands Museum (MA), Nashville Film Festival (TN) to name a few. Until its recent sunset, Molteni served on the board of the Golden Dome School for mystic artists. 

For more info related to the film and Molteni’s Shaker research: Unseen Hours: Space Clearing for Spirit Work, the Sacred Sheets film’s accompanying publication, is sold in the ICA Store, as are copies of Boston Art Review’s Fall issue Make Believe which includes an essay co-written by Molteni and Laura Campagna. Read about Shaker and Spiritualist influence found in “Believers” and other recent area exhibitions in Holding a Mirror to Heaven. This June Molteni’s installation, “All Around the Room” will open at Hancock Shaker Village.

• Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
• Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
• A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
• ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.