They Denied Themselves Indulgence in Everything — Except Their Art

“ON EARTH AS it is in heaven,” wasn’t simply a prayer for the Shakers, a small Protestant sect that practiced communal living and peaked in the mid-19th century: It was the bedrock of their lives. In the mid-1800s, Shaker Sarah Bates depicted this collision of heaven with earth in “Wings of Holy Wisdom, Wings of the Heavenly Father.” In cobalt and inky blues, she drew churning stars and slivered moons, holy scrolls and books cracked open by birds, God’s hand reaching through dark heavens, trumpets and swords among unfurling flowers.

The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming originated in England in 1747 and were guided to America in 1774 by Mother Ann Lee, an illiterate factory worker who became the community’s charismatic leader. Their ecstatic dancing during worship led some to call them “shaking Quakers,” later shortened to “Shakers.” Lee preached ideals such as pacifism and gender and racial equality, and in the new communities in America, she introduced celibacy and no private property. Lee was persecuted and imprisoned for her beliefs, and among many Shakers, she was considered the second coming of Christ in female form.

From about 1837 to 1857, some Shakers began receiving images and messages — many believed to come from Holy Mother Wisdom, who the Shakers saw as the “personified feminine” aspect of God along with the “Almighty Father” as the masculine personification, art historian Sally Promey wrote in her book Spiritual Spectacles. Some people believed the messages came from departed loved ones, and they recorded them in paintings, dances, songs, drawings, and spirit writings, in which a scribe would capture characters and designs that looked like words and letters but whose meaning was unknown — kind of like a “visual equiva-lent for speaking in tongues,” Promey wrote. This period was known as the Era of Manifestations or “Mother’s Work.”

The “gift drawings” of that era burst with geometrical shapes, holy symbols, and heaps of color. The creators of the gift drawings called themselves “instruments,” not artists, and most were women and young people — typically “the least powerful members of Shaker society,” Promey wrote.