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May 28, 2025

Celibate chic: why do we continue to fetishise Shaker design?

Every generation stages its own Shaker design revival. The Whitney Museum of American Art had a big show in 1986, in the middle of the postmodernist boom. The artists emerging in the 1960s, including Donald Judd, Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly, were keen collectors of Shaker furniture; before that, artist Charles Sheeler depicted Shaker interiors as places of proto-modernist contemplation.

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