Since arriving in America from England 250 years ago, the Shakers — a Christian sect of pacifists — have occupied a unique place in the American national identity. Also known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, the Shakers ascribe to values of communal living, celibacy, shared property, and gender and racial equality, and they are widely recognized for their simple living, architecture, music, and furniture. The Shakers have captured the imagination of countless artists since at least the early twentieth century, when ideas about perfection, elegance, and practicality associated with Shaker life and material culture 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 collectors of Shaker furniture.

Believers begins with the fruits of an unorthodox residency instigated by curator France Morin during the summer of 1996. Ten artists were invited to live, work, and worship in the only remaining active Shaker community, in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. The residency yielded a dynamic body of works featured in the exhibition The Quiet in the Land, curated by Morin and brought to the ICA by Jill Medvedow in 1998. 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—several of which are being remade or reimagined 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 negotiate the space between received representations of the Shakers and the utopian community’s vital experience as “ordinary people attempting to live an extraordinary life.”