Basket, Mount Lebanon, NY. Last quarter of c19th. These small baskets were attached to fancy boxes made for tourists. They held sewing notions.
Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon has received a $25,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to support a comprehensive review of its collections. This grant follows on the tail of a $750,000 grant the Museum received from the Luce Foundation in 2016 to support a two and a half year project to catalog and digitize its collections and put the results online. That project was completed on time and on budget at the end of 2018 and its results can be seen online.
Collections Manager
Sharon Duane Koomler is a Shaker scholar and traditional letterpress printer living in upstate New York. She has academic degrees in American Folklore from Indiana University and Western Kentucky University. Sharon has worked at Shaker Museums from Kentucky to New Hampshire as an educator, curator, consultant, and director. She has written and published on Shaker material culture and spirituality, and lectured widely on Shaker art, life, and belief. Sharon has a particular interest in the under-researched social aspects of Shaker life and ways in which Shakers practiced inclusion and intentionality.