It is important to keep in mind that there is nothing purely decorative about the furniture, gift drawings, and retail products in this large survey of Shaker design at Bard College's New York outpost for studies in the decorative arts, design, and culture. The objects created for use within Shaker communities, which at one point numbered nineteen and ranged from Maine to Kentucky, hew to the precepts of their religious devotion, in particular the aspiration to honesty, utility, and order. Those items created for "the World's people," the denomination's catch-all term for anyone outside its communities, betray a savvy knowledge of what would possess commercial appeal. This latter point is particularly important to the exhibition's organizer, Jean M. Burks, who aims to highlight links between members of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing and wider American society, countering stereotypical notions of the Shakers as intentionally and thoroughly segregated.

Among the exemplary furniture presented in a ground-floor gallery are an enormous cherry-and-pine double trustees' desk (used by family members responsible for dealings with the World) and a slender, comparatively small trestle table. Like classical civilizations, which come to mind now largely tethered to images of white marble artifacts, the Shaker world was not the stripped-down domain we imagine, but rather a polychrome environment. To that end, the gallery floor is painted yellow, a color common in Shaker rooms, and a few pieces bear other original hues. A second-floor gallery hosts a number of gift drawings, manifestations of divine revelation (often in the form of communications from past generations) that encompass decorative patterns; calligraphic text; and assemblies of doves of peace, trees, clocks, fruit, and musical instruments. (New Yorkers more familiar with modern art than nineteenth-century religious artifacts might recall the Drawing Center's 2005 exhibition "3 x Abstraction.") Although the exhibition does not present Hannah Cohoon's Tree of Life, 1854, perhaps the movement's most iconic image, it does include her A Little Basket Full of Beautiful Apples for the Ministry, 1846, a touching ink-and-watercolor drawing of fourteen apples arranged within the schematic outline of a basket. Another room teems with commercial products, from toothache pellets and sachets of cabbage seeds to "screwballs" (table-clamped pincushions) and oval-shaped boxes. For context, the exhibition presents early-nineteenth-century American Fancy furniture and objects, which the Shakers rejected because of their ornate designs, and examples of modern Scandinavian furniture and contemporary designs (by Roy McMakin and Antonio Citterio, among others) inspired by Shaker objects. A full slate of public programs further ensures that this exhibition is the most important New York presentation of Shaker design since the Whitney Museum's 1986 survey.