SHAKER MUSEUM AND LIBRARY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Old Chatham, New York  - Partners of the Landmarks Visitor Center in Hudson announce the opening of Interpretive Visions: The Works of Fern Apfel and Jane Feldman, an exhibit of works on paper by two Columbia County artists.

Fern Apfel is a portraitist – not of people but of things. Remnants of the past: old stamps, pages of diaries, newspapers, pieces from well-thumbed books – are her subjects. By invoking the materials of the past, Apfel speaks to our present yearning for simplicity and authenticity. At the heart of her mixed-media paintings is the sense of grace found in the “ordinariness” of our daily lives. Apfel’s works quietly suggest the relationships between our present and our past. Although the human figure is absent from her work, these paintings are deeply rooted in the human condition.

Jane Feldman is an award-winning photojournalist and social activist. One of Feldman is the co-author/photographer of Jefferson’s Children: The Story of One American Family, and four books in Random House’s “Young Dreamers” series. As an international activist for human rights, peace, and the environment, her work has shown at the United Nations in Manhattan and the Human Rights Conference in Vienna. Her portraits include Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Maya Angelou, and the Dalai Lama. Feldman recently presented a workshop, “Visions of Peace in Contemporary Art” in which she and participants explored ways in which artists can affect social change in today’s world.

Interpretive Visions opens at the Landmarks Visitor Center on Friday, November 17, 2006, with an artist’s reception from 5:00 until 7:00 pm. The Landmarks Visitor Center is a collaboration between Columbia County Tourism, Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Frederic Church’s Olana, Shaker Museum and Library, Clermont State Historic Site, Martin Van Buren National Historic Site and Columbia County Historical Society. The Center is located at 547 Warren Street in downtown Hudson and is open Thursday through Sunday, 10:00 until 5:00 through December 24, 2006. The artist’s works, as well as a selection of offerings from the partners’ gift shops are available for sale.

For additional information please call Sharon Koomler, Shaker Museum and Library, at 518-794-9100 ext. 222.

 

September 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Old Chatham,NY - The Shaker Museum and Library presents an artist’s reception for Gift, a site-responsive work by Léonie Guyer. Gift is informed by the artist's consideration of Shaker gift drawings and architecture and inspired by a natural resonance between these works and her own creative practice. The long-term installation occupies one room of the Brethren's Work Shop (1829), a four story brick building located at the Museum's recently acquired North Family property in Mount Lebanon Shaker Village. Guyer's paintings and installations explore idiosyncratic shapes and the spaces they inhabit. By working directly on the surfaces of the extant plaster walls and one window, Guyer has applied traces of her internalized experience onto the architecture itself. Intimate in scale and discretely sited, the paintings have become a temporary layer in the history and life of the building.

Leonie Guyer’s painting-centered practice extends from studio-based works to site responsive installations. It investigates the interconnection between idiosyncratic shapes and the spaces they inhabit. The shapes elude naming while they embody fragments of possible meanings. Guyer’s interest in Shaker gift drawings was sparked by an encounter with a single work in a San Francisco gallery in the 1990s. Comprised of cryptic script in linear and geometric configurations, it seemed to hover between writing and drawing. The Shaker Museum and Library’s decision to work with Guyer continues a long tradition of supporting artists who have drawn inspiration from the Shakers – from their art, artifacts, music, and dance. A limited edition catalog to accompany the exhibition is being published by the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon.

The reception will be held in the Brethren’s Work Shop, Mount Lebanon Shaker Village, on Saturday, September 16, from 2:00 until 4:00 pm. Guyer will present an illustrated public lecture about her work on Monday, September 18, at 7:00 pm, in the living room of The Forge at Mount Lebanon Shaker Village.

For more information call the Shaker Museum and Library at 518-794-9100 ext. 211 or visit www.shakermuseumandlibrary.org
 

July 29, 2006

For Immediate Release

Old Chatham, NY - The Shaker Museum and Library hosted its annual gala on Saturday evening at Mount Lebanon Shaker Village under the theme “Our Journey Begins.”  Under festive tents located next to the Tannery Pond, the museum celebrated its annual affair with a tribute to Murray Douglas and Faity Tuttle. A crowd of more than 200 joined the Museum for the first gala held at the Mount Lebanon site since merging with the Mount Lebanon Shaker Village in 2004. 

The evening featured a silent and live auction, and raised a record amount of funds to benefit the operations and construction projects in progress.  A sumptuous buffet was catered by Tom Carlucci.  Live music was provided by Caryn Niedrinhaus and her Young Fidlers.

Event Chairperson, Denise Clayton, of New Lebanon, was thrilled by the turnout.  “It is so exciting to be hosting our first big event here at the original Shaker site”, she said.  “Many people are here for the first time, and now understand why we’re working so hard to reunite the collection with its original home.”   Board Chairman, Jeffrey Lick noted, “The support of the community is heart-warming.  The project to restore this site is an enormous undertaking.  While Darrow School will soon celebrate 75 years on this site, there are many partners including Tannery Pond Concerts, the School of Visual Arts Summer Program in the Berkshires, and the World Monuments Fund among others.  We are also building a partnership with Hancock Shaker Village that will create a larger cultural center in the region.” 

Faity Tuttle served on the Museum’s Board of Directors from 1967 until 1990.She assisted with the Museum’s public relations regionally and in New York City.  Faity was active in bringing notable attention to the Museum with visits from Norman Rockwell, Eric Sloane, and N. C. Wyeth, Jr. She worked on numerous committees and special events, particularly with the Antiques Festival.  Faity was especially interested in the performing arts and brought Shaker song and dance performances to the Museum.

Murray Douglas has served the Museum for over 50 years on committees, in fundraising, during special events, and on the Board as a Life Director.  Murray played an important role in the construction of the Museum’s first secure, climate-controlled storage building for the collection.  She took inspiration from Shaker objects and textiles at times and translated them to her work at Brunschweig & Fils.

While the event was graciously hosted on the Darrow School property, it’s only a short walk from the North Family site where the Museum will move its vast collection of Shaker objects. Already stabilization of two historic buildings is underway at the Shaker Washhouse and the Granary.

The Granary is part of a unique field school sponsored by the New York-based World Monuments Fund.  The nine-week field school, which began in June 2006, has brought together apprentices from the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) in Charleston, SC, and the Association Ouvrière des Compagnons du Devoir et Tour de France (Compagnons) from across France, to work with graduate-level architecture and building construction students from the University of Florida’s College of Design Construction and Planning and high school students from the Preservation Arts & Technology Program at the Brooklyn High School of the Arts, New York City, to document and restore the timber frame of the North Family Shaker Granary (1838) at Mount Lebanon Shaker Village.  One of the oldest structures on the site, the Shaker granary is the only one in the world that still survives.  

The Shaker Museum and Library in Old Chatham, New York, founded in 1950 by John S. Williams, Sr., was originally developed as a privately owned museum dedicated to preserving “life, work, art, and religion” of the Shakers, the largest communal religious sect in America during its peak in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.  Shaker leaders personally aided this effort, and the Museum’s collection includes materials from nearly every Shaker community and from all Shaker time periods, most notably from the principal Shaker community at nearby Mount Lebanon, New York.  The collection includes over 60,000 objects and artifacts, including original furniture, textiles, tools, and manufactured goods produced by the Shakers, as well as Shaker manuscripts and printed works, photographs, and artwork.  The American Association of Museums has accredited the Museum and Library since 1972.  In 2002, the Shaker Museum and Library launched the Mount Lebanon Project to restore the North Family Site of Mount Lebanon Shaker Village as the institution’s new home.

Once the spiritual and physical center of the Christian sect known as the Shakers, the Mount Lebanon Shaker Village was at its height in 1860, home to some 600 believers who lived in more than 120 buildings spread over more than 6,000 acres.  At Mount Lebanon, the Shakers’ religious beliefs and organizing tenets helped create a unique theology and social order based upon a range of ideals, including celibate communal living, new theories about the hierarchy and composition of the traditional family, and the rethinking of both industrial and agricultural production and distribution.  The Shakers’ aesthetic principles that defined the group’s distinct material culture—including objects, furnishings, architecture, and entire villages—were developed and first used at Mount Lebanon.

World Monuments Fund (WMF) is the foremost private, nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of endangered architectural and cultural sites around the world.  Since 1965, WMF has worked tirelessly to stem the loss of historic structures at more than 400 sites in over 80 countries.  WMF’s work spans a wide range of sites, including the vast temple complexes at Angkor, Cambodia; the historic center of Mexico City; Nicholas Hawksmoor’s London masterpiece, St. George’s, Bloomsbury; the iconic modernist A. Conger Goodyear house in Old Westbury, New York; and the extraordinary 18th-century Qianlong Garden complex in Beijing’s Forbidden City.  From its headquarters in New York City —and offices and affiliates in Paris, London, Madrid, and Lisbon—WMF works with local partners and communities to identify and save important heritage through innovative programs of project planning, fieldwork, advocacy, grant-making, education, and on-site training.  Every two years, WMF issues its World Monuments Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites, a global call to action on behalf of sites in need of immediate intervention. (www.wmf.org) 

The last Shakers were relocated from Mount Lebanon to nearby Hancock Shaker Village in 1947.  Seventy-two acres and approximately 40 original Shaker buildings were declared a National Historic Landmark District.  The Darrow School has operated on the site since 1932.  The Shaker Museum and Library, whose preeminent collection is currently housed on a non-Shaker site in Old Chatham, acquired the North Family Site of Mount Lebanon in 2004 and has completed a master plan for relocating to the landmark property, thus repatriating many of the Shaker objects and artifacts back to the place where they were created.  

The Shaker Museum and Library in Old Chatham, New Yorkk, founded in 1950 by John S. Williams, Sr., was originally developed as a privately owned museum dedicated to preserving “life, work, art, and religion” of the Shakers, the largest communal religious sect in America during its peak in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.  Shaker leaders personally aided this effort, and the Museum’s collection includes materials from nearly every Shaker community and from all Shaker time periods, most notably from the principal Shaker community at nearby Mount Lebanon, New York.  The collection includes over 38,000 objects and artifacts, including original furniture, textiles, tools, and manufactured goods produced by the Shakers, as well as Shaker manuscripts and printed works, photographs, and artwork.  The American Association of Museums has accredited the Museum and Library since 1972.  In 2002, the Shaker Museum and Library launched the Mount Lebanon Project to restore the North Family Site of Mount Lebanon Shaker Village as the institution’s new home. 

Preservation Trades Network

(PTN) is a non-profit membership organization committed to representing and strengthening the role of the traditional trades in the preservation process through education, networking, and outreach.  PTN is an umbrella organization that unites a variety of trades involved in building and preservation including: timber framing, carpentry, masonry, plaster and decorative arts, historic roofing, and metallurgy.  PTN has an annual conference based on demonstrations and education and collaboration with other organizations and non-profits to expand educational opportunities and to build a network of trades resources.  This networking process, which is fundamental to the PTN efforts, has established a strong foundation for collaboration and exchange with programs in the United States and abroad. 

PTN is working to sustain the success of existing trades education programs, recognizing the contributions of the masters of the trades and creating opportunities for future generations of trades people.  In 2003, PTN created the International Trades Education Initiative (ITES) to address the needs impacting trades education.  (www.ptn.org)  

The University of Florida, College of Design, Construction and Planning’s Historic Preservation Program is one of the oldest and most respected of its kind in the United States.  For half a century, the University of Florida has led the nation with courses in historic preservation and urban conservation.  The new, graduate-level (Master and Ph.D.) Interdisciplinary Concentration and Certificate in Historic Preservation at the University of Florida is unique in the country, as no other program offers this kind of concentration in the components of architecture, landscape architecture, urban and neighborhood planning, building construction, and museum studies.  In 2004, the University of Florida was chosen by the UNESCO World Heritage Center in Paris to partner for an international Symposium on Modern Architecture in Miami because of its leadership role in the field.  The University is an institutional member of US/ICOMOS and a founding member of the National Council for Preservation Education.  The College’s field schools have been a model for the country, including the Preservation Institute: Nantucket and the Preservation Institute: Caribbean. (www.dcp.ufl.edu/hp)