NEW LEBANON — Fordham University in New York City has received a $50,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation’s Theology Program to fund a project that explores Shaker Art, Design, and Religion, in partnership with Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon. The grant is a companion to the $750,000 grant awarded by the Luce Foundation’s American Art Program to the Shaker Museum to digitize its collections. The project will be co-directed by Dr. Kathryn Reklis, a professor in the theology department at Fordham, and Lacy Schutz, executive director of the Shaker Museum. They will convene a group of eight Fellows to explore the experiential and communal aspects of Shakerism and the relationship between art and religion in museum spaces. Two convenings will take place at Fordham and one at the Shaker Museum, beginning this fall and running through fall 2019.

The project will bring together religious studies scholars, theologians, art historians, scholars of material culture, practicing artists, and museum professionals both to understand more about the Shakers themselves, but also to think about how to engage the public with the history of a group like the Shakers. “We want to explore how artists, academics, and museum professionals all contribute to how we understand the relationship between religion and art,” Reklis said.

Over the course of the three meetings, the Fellows will work with the Shaker Museum’s extensive collection of Shaker material culture and will think about how to incorporate the values and spirit of the Shakers into the museum’s mission and programming.

Confirmed Fellows include: Courtney Bender, Ph.D., professor of religion at Columbia University; Ashon Crawley, Ph.D., assistant professor of religious studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia; Lesley Dill, artist; Carter E. Foster, deputy director of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin; David Leslie, executive director of the Rothko Chapel; Sally Promey, professor of religion and visual culture and director of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, Yale University Divinity School; Maggie Taft, Independent Scholar/Haddon Avenue Writing Institute.

When complete, the group will share their findings through a to-be-determined means, such as a symposium, an art show, public essays for the museum’s website, and/or a series of academic essays.

In her academic research, Reklis has explored questions about embodiment and ecstatic Protestantism. Her first book is a study of bodily ecstasy and communal memory in the First Great Awakenings of the 1730s and 40s. As a co-founder of the Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice (http://artreligionandsocialjustice.org/) she brought artists and theologians into public conversation at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. “That work was so meaningful to me, and the most exciting part of this new project is the partnership with the Shaker Museum,” Reklis said.