![](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/shaker_sacred_sheet_fairbanks__wicks_nga-807x1024.jpg)
I can only be grateful to Léonie Guyer for writing about her transformative encounter with Shaker gift drawings, even though she’s been sleeping on this info for twenty two years.
![](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/fw_shaker_gift_drawing_center.jpg)
It’s not her fault The Drawing Center held its exhibition of Shaker gift drawings and gift songs in November 2011–wasn’t everyone downtown a bit preoccupied?
![](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/shaker_gift_drawing_bates_cbs_pma-1024x751.jpg)
And there are enough conflicting, self-serving accounts of its creation that it’s understandable, I guess, if it’s not yet universally recognized graphic design history that the CBS logo came from a detail of a Shaker gift drawing, an all-seeing eye spotted in 1950 by William Golden in Alexey Brodovich’s magazine.
![](https://greg.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/tantric_painting_feature_colors.jpg)
Shaker furniture, via Sheeler, was my bridge from American antiques to modernism. I practice a religion founded in the same mid-19th century hothouse of spiritualism that had Shaker “instruments” seeing visions and dreams and visitations and translating them to “makers,” who drew them on paper. I made my Father Couturier pilgrimages early at Dominique de Menil’s urging at the Rothko Chapel. I swooned over Hudson’s tantric paintings [which were meditative objects, not products, but still]. I MEAN, HILMA AF KLINT, PEOPLE.
And I still can’t help feel that the world has somehow conspired to keep me from ever hearing about Shaker gift drawings. And I am shook.
In The Place Just RIght [openspace.sfmoma.org]