'Handled With Care: The Function Of Form In Shaker Craft'

PITTSFIELD, MASS.

:A chance visit to the Hancock Shaker Village 30 years ago this summer set in motion the gathering of an enviable collection of Shaker articles, a portion of which comprises half the new exhibition currently on view there, "Handled with Care: The Function of Form in Shaker Craft."

The more than 150 pieces making up the exhibit were culled equally from the collections of M. Stephen Miller and the Hancock Shaker Village itself. Miller was that chance visitor who was bitten by the Shaker bug. Soon afterward, he and his wife, Miriam, purchased a Shaker string bean label in a Berkshire County antiques shop. And they were off, or, as Miriam Miller says wryly, "It was like eating one potato chip." Their collection has grown to encompass furniture, textiles, small crafts and printed paper, with the latter two being his favorites.

The lustrous surfaces and honeyed tones of baskets, carriers, swifts, metalware and other utilitarian objects beckon the visitor into the gallery where the pure forms created and used by Shakers are arrayed according to function in the same kind of utilitarian setting in which they were created and used. The tactile quality of each piece on view makes a visitor yearn to touch them all.

Their commonality lies in their handles - except in the few instances where there are knobs. That each object has a handle or a knob attests to its essential utility. Most have seen use, which only heightens their appeal. They have been handled carefully since they were created. As curator of collections Christian Goodwillie and collector and co-curator Miller put it, they were, "Made with care, used with care and preserved with care."

"Handled with Care" is the product of a careful collaboration between these two students of all things Shaker. It is also a documentation of the partnership between the curator and the collector. Co-curators Goodwillie and Miller feed off one another, each plumbing the other's depths for opinions and facts. At the same time, a mutual admiration society is at work. Hearing them discuss the Shaker objects that they obviously treasure, one is reminded of proud parents. They delight in their progeny.

Both refer to the Andrews collection, the nucleus of the collections at the Hancock Shaker Village, as "the gold standard." "Trust only the Andrews collection," they both say, although Goodwillie defers to Miller's views of the origins of particular pieces. As he puts it, "If Steve says it is, it is."

Each object on view has been carefully researched with respect to origin, history and materials. Miller has developed an Index of Attribution that quantifies the degree of certitude as to community of origin the curators assigned to each object in the exhibit. When they were 90 percent confident of the origin, they cited the community. When they were 75 to 90 percent sure, they gave the attribution a "probably" caveat; a "possibly" covered a 50 to 75 percent confidence and when they were less than 50 percent confident, the community was described as "unknown."