Past Exhibitions

On view April 15, 2023

On view April 15, 2023

On view through November 14, 2022 Click above for details.

Local and Land Made: Growing a New Textile Economy featured 19th Century Shaker wool-working tools from the Hancock Shaker Village collection and Laura Sansone's curated selection of contemporary textiles. Exhibition dates: September 19 - November 21, 2021. 

Weaving together the work of artists and performers Our Native Daughters, Brad Wells, Roomful of Teeth, and Allison Smith, Climbing the Holy Hill was conceived as a celebration of the Shaker pilgrimages to the peak of Shaker Mountain—what they sometimes called the “Holy Hill” or “Mount Sinai”. Exhibition dates: September 23 - November 28, 2021

28-year-old Thomas Barger is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Barger is originally from a rural cattle farm in Mattoon, Illinois. Like many transplants, his move to New York City was motivated by necessity. Barger came to New York to access his own homosexual identity at a distance from his rural, conservative, religious background. Amidst this new chosen environment, Barger’s work has been a process of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual exploration grounded in craft, narrative, and humor.

Tory Burch is an American fashion designer, and the Executive Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of Tory Burch. She launched the company in 2004 with a boutique in New York City and an ecommerce site. The brand has since grown into a global business with boutiques from New York to Paris and Shanghai. In 2009, she launched the Tory Burch Foundation to advance women’s empowerment and entrepreneurship in the United States by providing access to capital, education and digital resources, as well as a Fellowship program. One of the most influential fashion designers today, Tory Burch chose Hancock Shaker Village as the setting for her virtual Spring/Summer 2021 presentation in October 2020, finding inspiration in the museum's buildings and artifacts.

Gary Graham is an artist who approaches fashion design as a material culture of elegance and decay. Upon graduating with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he began working for artist and designer J. Morgan Puett, learning the craft of garment dyeing and less formal approaches to textiles and historical interpretation. In 1999 he designed his first collection and in 2009 Graham was honored as a CFDA/Vogue finalist. Working with museums ranging from The Peabody Essex Museum to The American Folk Art Museum and RISD Museum, Graham mines museological archives for inspiration in installations and performances that explore history as a living experience. In 2021 Graham was selected to be a contestant on the second season of Amazon Prime's "Making the Cut". A history-loving designer storyteller, Gary Graham is inspired by material culture that blend fictional characters with historical narratives. Blurring distinctions between past, present and future, his work offers a creative approach to the tactile and sensual attributes of textiles and the drama of contemporary historical interpretation.

The year 2020 marked the 60th anniversary of Hancock Shaker Village as a museum. Notes About Home is a poignant look back, connecting past to present as we envision the future. The exhibit is a dynamic collage of photographs, newspaper articles, posters, blueprints, oral histories, and videos.

Opening in May 2018, Hancock Shaker Village will exhibit its rare Shaker “gift” or “spirit” drawings for the first time in decades.  Mysterious, decorative, and ornate (the opposite of what we think of as Shaker design, which is experiencing strong interest currently), the drawings were not shared outside the Shaker community.