In the Meetinghouse: A Co-Led Walkthrough of A World in the Making

Find out at our upcoming gallery walkthrough of A World in the Making: The Shakers, co-led by artist Amie Cunat and scholar Jayna Brown. Cunat will take visitors inside her large-scale meetinghouse installation to discuss how historic Shaker architecture fuels her vibrant visual practice.

Bridging the physical space with the social archive, Professor Jayna Brown (Brown University), author of Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021), will center the groundbreaking legacy of Philadelphia’s own Rebecca Cox Jackson and Rebecca Perot. As founders of the only Black-led Shaker settlement—and uniquely, the only one to exist in a city setting—the "two Rebeccas" created an extraordinary blueprint for Black female autonomy and spiritual community.

About the Artist

Amie Cunat
Amie Cunat was born in McHenry, Illinois, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Her paintings use decorative and organic elements to move between abstraction and perception. Chromatically charged and optically insistent, the compositions form exclamatory moments that occupy intermediate, phenomenal, and monstrous spaces.

Cunat earned a MFA from Cornell University, Post-Baccalaureate in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in Visual Arts and Art History from Fordham University. She has exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art - University of Pennsylvania (PA), Vitra Design Museum (Germany), Dinner Gallery (NY), Peep Projects (PA), Ochi Gallery (ID), DIMIN (NY), Eric Firestone Gallery (NY), Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, and DC Moore Gallery (NY) among others. She was the recipient of a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work and a 2019 Regional Economic Development Council Grant by NYSCA in collaboration with Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon. Cunat was a 2023 resident at Yaddo.

Jayna Brown

Jayna Brown is Professor and Chair of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. Her areas of knowledge and interest include black expressive cultures, film, queer of color critique, anarchism, materialism and science fiction. Her first book, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2008) won Best Book awards from both the American Society for Theatre Research and the Theater Library Association. She has also published on African American race film and popular performance in various journals including The Journal of Popular Music Studies, GLQ, Social Text and Women and Performance. Her new book, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, Spring, 2021) traces black radical utopian practice and performance, from the psychic travels of Sojourner Truth to the cosmic transmissions of Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra. A current project on terraformation, or the modification of inhabitable environments to make them livable for the human species, asks after the ethics of human habitation in this moment, for neither the scorched earth nor the burning surface of Mars can provide us with virgin soil upon which to start over.

About the Exhibition

A World in the Making: The Shakers explores the design legacy of the Shakers, a religious group whose values of community, labor, and equality shaped their furniture, architecture, and everyday objects. Through works by contemporary artists influenced by the Shakers, alongside original Shaker-made pieces, the exhibition considers how their design principles remain relevant today.

Founded in 18th-century England and later established in the U.S. across more than twenty distinct communities, from Kentucky to Maine, Shaker communities developed a distinctive visual language—marked by simplicity, innovation, and purpose. While often celebrated for their aesthetic, Shaker designs were rooted in spiritual practice and collective life.

By pairing historical artifacts with newly commissioned works, the exhibition invites reflection on how Shaker ideals continue to inform conversations around inclusion, gender, and intentional living in the 21st century.

This exhibition was organized by the Vitra Design Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Wüstenrot Foundation in collaboration with Shaker Museum.

Accessibility

ICA is committed to creating a welcoming environment for all visitors. For more notes on accessibility including accessible parking nearby visit our Accessibility landing page. If you require any accessibility accommodations or have any questions about the program, please contact us at [email protected].

Support

Programming at ICA is made possible in part by the Emily and Jerry Spiegel Fund to Support Contemporary Culture and Visual Arts and the Lise Spiegel Wilks and Jeffrey Wilks Family Foundation. Public and Student Engagement at ICA is supported by the Bernstein Public Engagement Fund, Suzanne Weiss Doft & Jacob W. Doft, Stacey & Robert Goergen Jr., Hilarie L. & Mitchell Morgan, the Nash Family Foundation, Joline & David Stemerman, and by Dana McDonald Strong & Mark W. Strong.