Expert Series: "The Shakers"
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Join us for a conversation exploring how the Shakers’ principles of community, purposeful design and minimalism shaped their daily life and continue to inspire and influence makers and artists today. Inspired by the exhibition The Shakers: A World in the Making, this discussion will reveal the surprising ways a small American utopian community continues to inspire creativity, sustainability, and thoughtful design.
The Expert Series welcomes renowned artists, scholars, and cultural activators to the Museum for expansive dialogues that dive deeper into an exhibition, artist, or theme.
The Shakers: A World in the Making is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Vitra Design Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Wüstenrot Foundation, in collaboration with Shaker Museum, Chatham, New York
This drop-in experience is included with Museum admission. On Thursday nights from 4 to 8 p.m., admission is pay-what-you-wish at the door, while tickets purchased online in advance are full price. The Milwaukee Art Museum is grateful to its exhibition sponsors.
Meet the experts:
Chris L. Halstrøm is a Danish/Swedish furniture designer and textile artist, educated at The Royal Danish Academy, Furniture in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2007, with prior studies in Stockholm, Sweden and Berlin, Germany. Halstrøm has worked commercially with companies such as Fritz Hansen and Design Within Reach, and more experimentally with objects for numerous exhibitions, including at The Mak Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, USA, and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa, Japan. Halstrøm has received several grants and prizes, including the Three-Year Work Grant from The Danish Arts Foundation in 2017, The Finn Juhl Prize 2022, and Ole Haslunds Kunstnerfond 2024. Since 2020, Halstrøm has mainly focused on their textile art practice, exhibiting in Denmark, Sweden, the UK, the USA, and Germany.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner and death doula in training. Her middle name, Janan, meaning heart and soul, comes from the Arabic root J-N-N (جنان), evoking that which is unmoored, veiled, and wayward. Her work explores the politics and poetics of noncompliance and disobedience through written, spoken, and visual language. A “language person” (Paul Soulellis) who “gives language a body” (Chang Yuchen), she works across large-scale installations, multichannel video, publications, software, performance, public archives, and learning platforms. Rasheed is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021) and a Creative Capital Award (2022). She is a full-time critic at Yale School of Art and the inaugural Charles Gaines Chair at CalArts.
Sarah Margolis-Pineo is a writer and independent curator specializing in American craft and design. She is Director of Programs at The Mount, Edith Wharton Cultural Center, and an Associate of John Keith Russell, specialists in antique Shaker furniture and material culture. Previously, she served as curator at Hancock Shaker Village and as Luce Associate Curator at the American Folk Art Museum. Her writing appears in numerous exhibition catalogs, including The Shakers: A World in the Making (2025). Margolis-Pineo is a founding board member of Fine Objects Society, co-president of the Boston Area Shaker Studies Group, and serves on the advisory committee for the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.
Studio gorm is design office founded in 2007 by John Arndt and Wonhee Arndt. They design products, furniture, lighting, interiors and exhibitions. Their designs are informed by their speculative academic research which explores culture, history and technology and how objects and ideas evolve to fit the needs of modern life. Their products are simple practical and thoughtful, approachable forms designed for everyday life. Their office is based in Eugene Oregon where they are both professors in the Product Design Department at the University of Oregon. They are the founders of the international design collective Furnishing Utopia in 2015 where they started researching American Shaker’s design ethos and have been working as one of the principal organizers.
Image credit:
Meetinghouse (1793), Hancock Shaker Village, Hancock, MA, 2024. Photo: © Vitra Design Museum / Alex Lesage, courtesy Hancock Shaker Village
The Expert Series welcomes renowned artists, scholars, and cultural activators to the Museum for expansive dialogues that dive deeper into an exhibition, artist, or theme.
The Shakers: A World in the Making is organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Vitra Design Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Wüstenrot Foundation, in collaboration with Shaker Museum, Chatham, New York
This drop-in experience is included with Museum admission. On Thursday nights from 4 to 8 p.m., admission is pay-what-you-wish at the door, while tickets purchased online in advance are full price. The Milwaukee Art Museum is grateful to its exhibition sponsors.
Meet the experts:
Chris L. Halstrøm is a Danish/Swedish furniture designer and textile artist, educated at The Royal Danish Academy, Furniture in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2007, with prior studies in Stockholm, Sweden and Berlin, Germany. Halstrøm has worked commercially with companies such as Fritz Hansen and Design Within Reach, and more experimentally with objects for numerous exhibitions, including at The Mak Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, USA, and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa, Japan. Halstrøm has received several grants and prizes, including the Three-Year Work Grant from The Danish Arts Foundation in 2017, The Finn Juhl Prize 2022, and Ole Haslunds Kunstnerfond 2024. Since 2020, Halstrøm has mainly focused on their textile art practice, exhibiting in Denmark, Sweden, the UK, the USA, and Germany.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner and death doula in training. Her middle name, Janan, meaning heart and soul, comes from the Arabic root J-N-N (جنان), evoking that which is unmoored, veiled, and wayward. Her work explores the politics and poetics of noncompliance and disobedience through written, spoken, and visual language. A “language person” (Paul Soulellis) who “gives language a body” (Chang Yuchen), she works across large-scale installations, multichannel video, publications, software, performance, public archives, and learning platforms. Rasheed is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021) and a Creative Capital Award (2022). She is a full-time critic at Yale School of Art and the inaugural Charles Gaines Chair at CalArts.
Sarah Margolis-Pineo is a writer and independent curator specializing in American craft and design. She is Director of Programs at The Mount, Edith Wharton Cultural Center, and an Associate of John Keith Russell, specialists in antique Shaker furniture and material culture. Previously, she served as curator at Hancock Shaker Village and as Luce Associate Curator at the American Folk Art Museum. Her writing appears in numerous exhibition catalogs, including The Shakers: A World in the Making (2025). Margolis-Pineo is a founding board member of Fine Objects Society, co-president of the Boston Area Shaker Studies Group, and serves on the advisory committee for the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.
Studio gorm is design office founded in 2007 by John Arndt and Wonhee Arndt. They design products, furniture, lighting, interiors and exhibitions. Their designs are informed by their speculative academic research which explores culture, history and technology and how objects and ideas evolve to fit the needs of modern life. Their products are simple practical and thoughtful, approachable forms designed for everyday life. Their office is based in Eugene Oregon where they are both professors in the Product Design Department at the University of Oregon. They are the founders of the international design collective Furnishing Utopia in 2015 where they started researching American Shaker’s design ethos and have been working as one of the principal organizers.
Image credit:
Meetinghouse (1793), Hancock Shaker Village, Hancock, MA, 2024. Photo: © Vitra Design Museum / Alex Lesage, courtesy Hancock Shaker Village
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