Due to the popularity of the show, and to facilitate an increase in school group visits, the Farnsworth Art Museum will be extending the exhibition The Shakers: From Mount Lebanon to the World through March 8, 2015. The show of approximately 100 works opened in June 2014 and was organized in partnership with the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon in New Lebanon, New York; and the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village Museum in New Gloucester, Maine.

Drawn primarily from the collection of the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, the largest, broadest and deepest collection of Shaker material in the world, the show presents a comprehensive look at the religious, social and economic foundations of Shaker life, seen through Shaker-made objects. While the show is a historical overview seen through objects from Mount Lebanon, the spiritual and administrative center of the Shaker world, it importantly also includes a section on the Shakers at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, the last active Shaker community.

The exhibition has received critical acclaim in the National press. The Wall Street Journal called the exhibition: “an uplifting exhibition (which) highlights American ingenuity, resilience and fearlessness,” the Portland Press Herald noted that: “this may well come to be seen as the most important exhibition about Shaker culture ever,” while Antiques and the Arts Weekly playfully warns that visitors to the exhibition: “had better fasten their seatbelts.”

In conjunction with this exhibition, the Everyman Repertory Theatre, in partnership with the Farnsworth, will be performing the Shaker play As It Is in Heaven, by Arlene Hutton. The performances will be at the Rockport Opera House from February 20 through March 1, 2015. More information is available at everymanrep.org.

Lead support for The Shakers: From Mount Lebanon to the World includes the Henry Luce Foundation, The Davis Family Foundation, and an anonymous donor. Exhibition sponsors include Allen Insurance and Financial, Chilton Furniture of Maine, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, The Grasshopper Shop of Rockland, and Windsor Chairmakers. The primary media sponsor of this exhibition is Maine Home + Design.