Bench

United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (“Shakers”)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, Shakers (or United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing) united on this bench for religious services. In the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the Shakers established utopian communities that were progressive for the period in their practice of gender and social equality. The streamlined form of this bench also reflects the Shakers’ interests in asceticism and efficiency in the face of amplified American consumerism and industrialization.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art