(upbeat music) - Historically Inaccurate embroidery.

Learn about the progressive activism of the Shakers with Shaker Museum director, Lacy Schutz, and catcher performance by Chuck Lamb.

It's all ahead on this episode of AHA, A House for Arts.

- [Narrator] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include Chad and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, the Alexander and Marjorie Hover foundation, and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Laura Ayad.

And this is AHA, A House for Arts, a place for all things creative.

Let's send it over to Matt Rogowicz for today's field segment.

- I'm here in Catskill, New York to look at the Historically Inaccurate embroidery of Richard Saja.

Let's go.

- It was never my intention to be a middle-aged embroider.

It just happened, it all just happened.

It all came to this pinnacle of what I do now.

It's the holy trinity of color pattern and texture.

(gentle music) I didn't go to school for art.

I did a couple of classes at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Then I got the classical arts education in New Mexico.

Then I go into advertising.

And then I decided, all right, it's time.

Like I need to have something to call my own.

But that thing was actually the perfect combination of all three of those educations.

There's a graphic element to what I do.

There's a historic element to what I do.

And surface design taught me the basics of making art.

(soft upbeat music) Chinoiserie is a very traditional French textile pattern.

It was developed in a little village called Jouy on Jouy sauce, which is right outside of Versailles.

And it was the first commercially reproduced fabric available.

And it depicts pastoral scenes and idyllic scenes of people working in the fields or dancing around to maple or being pulled in a sled.

As I was waking from sleep one day, I could just see very clearly in my head, a traditional Chinoiserie wheat pattern, but with the figures having like the facial tattoos of Maori tribesmen, and I was like, Oh that seems like a viable, interesting idea.

You know, like with an economy of means you can sort of change something historic, make it a little more, make it subversive.

And so I just adapted the concept to include any embellishment over Chinoiserie way.

It was originally cushion concept that is evolved into framed art works.

So it's interesting.

It's like when I started doing the fine art work all of a sudden I was like, "Well, I need to... "This can't be random anymore.

"I need to start saying something."

And I just started embroidering what I found interesting which was stuff that had been interesting to me as a small child.

Play monsters, aliens, human-animal hybrids, the normal stuff.

(upbeat music) There was always this preoccupation with monsters from a very young age.

There were always these thematic elements that came up that I felt myself drawn to and it usually had to do with monsters being villainized.

Like they were always the bad guys and no one was ever willing to sort of understand them in these shows.

It was just like, they're the bad guys, they must be destroyed.

And I guess I always kind of felt like an outsider.

And I started identifying with those bad guys.

They were usually more interesting than anyone else on the show and the same applies to monster movies.

And so that became my personal iconography and none of this was deliberate.

It's sort of like it happened over time and it grew and evolved.

And I found like, Oh!

I love to embroider far over and over again.

So I just took the ball and ran with it.

And I've been doing essentially the same thing for 20 years now.

(gentle music) People love tradition and they love it even more now when it has a modern spin on it.

The cushion concept sort of nails those two things for people.

But it still has a light touch.

People often talk about the subversive quality of my work and the humor in my work.

It makes history approachable.

That always seems to have this framework of the freakish.

They are the difference, but that's what's interesting to me and just to do something pretty isn't really interesting to me.

The tow is already pretty.

It says it's one of the most traditional of the decorative arts.

So my work isn't interesting or valuable to me if it's not amping it up a couple of notches.

- Lacy Schutz is the executive director of the Shaker Museum in new Lebanon, New York, which holds the world's most comprehensive collection of Shaker objects, archives and books.

What can the everyday objects of American religious groups from the past, tell us about American society today?

Let's chat with Lacy to find out.

Lacy, welcome to A House for Arts.

It's such a pleasure to have you.

- Oh, thank you for having me.

This is really exciting.

- Yes, yes, absolutely.

I wanted to start off talking about some of your work at the Shaker Museum because you're the executive director of this wonderful institution.

But before we get into that, I thought I'd just give a little bit of background for some of our audiences on the Shakers, that they were, I understand that they were, they began their sector, their movement in the 1780s in new Lebanon, New York.

So not very far from where I'm sitting right now, at least.

And I understand too, that they have very progressive ideas about women's equality, gender equality, women's rights, racial equality, and this aesthetic of simplicity in their furniture and clothing.

But one of the things that's really fascinating about the Shakers and I'm wishing, hoping that you could flush this out a bit for us, Lacy, is their vision of utopia.

So what exactly was this vision of utopia that they had when they were emerging in the late 18th century?

And how did that develop over time?

- Well, utopia I think is a very secular word and it's not something the Shakers themselves would have used because it really has to do I think more with a social structure and a culture and the Shakers were a religious organization.

So they often referred to creating heaven on earth.

And I think our sort of a modern secular interpretation of that is a utopia.

But for them, it was very much about religion and they talked a lot about perfection and trying to achieve perfection in everything that they did.

And I think sometimes that also gets misinterpreted as being everything's at a right angle and everything's perfect, but for them it really meant living their lives in such a way that every act that they did, whatever kind of labor they were doing, or actually worship they were doing was in service of their religious belief system.

- And so tell me then about the Shaker Museum because people go to the Shaker Museum, they learn about this amazing group of people.

And I'm just curious, is the there's a new building that's being created for the museum, correct?

Does this new building... Tell me a little bit about it.

Does it reflect any of some of the ideals that the Shakers had for instance?

- Yeah, absolutely.

And the Shaker Museum collection has actually been off view for over 10 years now.

So we're excited to get this new building underway so that we can share this amazing collection with people.

But we've put a lot of thought into how to not recreate a Shaker experience, but to embrace some of the values.

So as we plan for the lobby, for instance, we don't want people to walk in and immediately be confronted by a barrier in the form of imposing sort of deaths.

We want people to come in and feel welcome, and that they're sort of entering a social space rather than something that is trying to exclude them from something.

- Right.

I mean, it sounds like people are really looking for that sense of community when they go in.

And I even understand that the Shakers in their day really actually emphasized the communal lifestyle.

And they would group families together in larger kind of extended families and in buildings.

Am I correct about that?

- Yeah.

That's important to know that what they called a family they didn't have blood, they weren't blood kin, they were kind of constructed families.

If somebody came in as an actual, like a husband and a wife, for instance, they would actually separate them because they wanted people to feel like they were part of a big group, not have these sort of very individual times to people.

- Right.

So I'm very curious to know, how can people see the collection now?

Are there any online programs especially with the pandemic going on?

- Well, the most of the collection is actually been digitized and it's online at shakermuseum.us and pretty much every exhibition that we've put on the last maybe six or seven years we have some representation of that online.

So it's possible to spend a fair amount of time sort of delving into museums programming.

And we do have ongoing online programming during the pandemic and a pop-up exhibition in downtown Chatham, New York, that's opened through the end of March.

- Right, right.

And I understand this was curated by an artist, correct?

- Yes.

There's wonderful artist and designer named Katie Stout who lives in Brooklyn.

And she came in and took a look at the collection and she brought just a completely fresh eye to the Shakers and picked a lot of objects that really challenged some of the concepts that people have about Shaker simplicity.

- I'm kind of curious to know, thinking about the Shakers in our contemporary period, I know that there's been relatively recent interest in them and you told me that they were largely celibate.

So I know Ken Burns has done a documentary about the Shakers in 1984.

And people obviously, I mean, they're still looking up the Shaker Museums exhibitions online or they were going there.

What do you think that they're looking for at the museum?

And do you agree with this arguments some people make that it's a lost culture?

- Well, I don't think it's a lost culture.

I think that the Shakers, they left behind an enormous record of their their lives and their communities.

And there is an active Shaker Community in Maine.

There's three Shakers there, but then there's a community of people who live and work and worship around them.

So I very much don't think it's lost.

I think it's alive.

And the Shaker faith and their belief system hasn't changed really.

It's been remarkably consistent for 250 years.

So I think it's still very much with us both in the living community in Maine, and in the material culture record that they left behind.

- I wanna put what you know about the Shakers and what we can learn about them in our current political moment.

Do you think that there's something about Shakers and Shaker history that has a parallel today in our current cultural and political moment and we have so many fights for justice and you have Black Lives Matter, and you have the pandemic lockdown as well, which sets a, creates a whole new set of limitations for us.

Do you think that learning about the Shakers now kind of can give us new lessons for today?

- I do.

They from their very beginnings, they believed that women were equal to men and had an equal role to play.

And they welcomed black Shakers into their communities from the late 1700s onward.

And I think that we're in a time where we are really wondering who are we as Americans?

What is American?

What does it mean to be American?

And there's all kinds of ways to answer that question.

But one of them looks back to the Shakers and says here was this community of people who came here really basically around the same time as the founding of our nation.

And they had these at the time.

And even sometimes today, like really radical progressive ideas about how to be in the world and how to treat people.

And I think enormously inspiring to think that there is a path that we can examine and look to as we try to figure out how to move forward in our current world.

- Right.

It almost sounds like the Shakers emerged at a time when, what we know as the United States was emerging as a new country and probably people then were trying to figure out what does it mean to be a now a member of the colonies or eventually to be an American?

What does that mean?

It almost sounds like we're now dealing with the same thing, we're like revisiting the same question but maybe from a slightly different angle.

- Yeah.

Well, I think it was a new country and especially the lots of people including the Shakers came here looking for a new way to live.

They wanted to leave behind some of the social and religious and cultural constrictions of the old world and create a new one.

And I think that we're all thinking about how nice it would be to create a new world right now.

- Right.

I want to know, kind of going back a little bit about your visions for the Shaker Museum in the future.

You talked about the new building and making it kind of a more space for social gathering.

Can you maybe give us one or two examples of what this might look like and what people can expect when the new museum building opens up?

- Well, we're plannings all the sort of normal museum, all the normal things that you'd expect to find at a museum, like exhibitions and lectures, and things like that.

But as we design the building itself, one of the things that we've done is try to create a lot of public space.

So there's space devoted to showing the collection, but there are spaces of different sizes so that people can gather together in various ways whether they want to just have a conversation with each other or host a workshop, or a talk, or anything.

And we've made a lot of effort to make sure that spaces are accessible after hours, so that they can easily close off the exhibitions, So that that building really becomes an active part of the community.

- Well, I'm sure we all miss the gathering together, right?

That sounds really amazingly Lacy.

It's such a great pleasure talking to you on the show.

And I can't wait to check out the new museum when it opens up.

- Well, thank you for having me.

This has really been fun.

- Thank you.

Please, welcome Chuck Lamb.

- Hey, how you guys doing?

My name is Chuck Lamb and it's a real pleasure to be here.

I'm going to play a composition.

This is dedicated to my brother, Pete.

And this is called "For Pete's Sake."

(playing piano) - Hi, everybody.

This is Rhea Curly.

I'm going to play a song that I wrote that was inspired by my nieces and nephews.

And by this pandemic that we're all going through.

It's called "Gonna Be Fine."

(playing piano) ♪ Sometimes it's ice as cold in the sun ♪ ♪ Sometimes a flame under water ♪ ♪ In the dream where you can't run ♪ ♪ Sometimes you're just a child ♪ ♪ Who only wants to play ♪ ♪ And then a butterfly who longs to turn the page ♪ ♪ But you're gonna be fine ♪ ♪ You're gonna be fine ♪ ♪ Yeah you're gonna be fine ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah yeah yeah ♪ ♪ If you trust in time ♪ ♪ You'll find ♪ ♪ That you're gonna be fine ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Say the words after mine ♪ ♪ You're gonna be fine ♪ ♪ Sometimes you wanna stay behind ♪ ♪ Sometimes you wanna catch ♪ ♪ The wind inside your soul ♪ ♪ And glide ♪ ♪ Sometimes you're falling up ♪ ♪ And climbing down again ♪ ♪ Sometimes you need the doctor ♪ ♪ To see the colors around the bed ♪ ♪ But you're gonna be fine ♪ ♪ You're gonna be fine ♪ ♪ Yeah you're gonna be fine ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah yeah yeah ♪ ♪ If you trust in time ♪ ♪ You'll find ♪ ♪ That you're gonna be fine ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Say the words after mine ♪ ♪ You're gonna be fine ♪ (playing piano) ♪ Fine ♪ ♪ Fine ♪ ♪ Fine ♪ ♪ Fine ♪ ♪ Fine ♪ ♪ Fine ♪ ♪ Fine ♪ ♪ Fine ♪ ♪ Fine ♪ ♪ Fine ♪ ♪ Fine ♪ ♪ Fine ♪ - Thanks for joining us.

For more arts visit wmht.org/aha and be sure to connect with WMHT on social.

I'm Laura Ayad.

Thanks for watching.

(playing piano) - [Narrator] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT Venture Fund.

Contributors include; Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malesardi, the Alexander and Marjorie Hover Foundation, and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M&T Bank, we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M&T bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.