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The Spirit of Experiment
John Haberin New York City
Early American Photography
Shaker Craft and American Quilting
Is photography an art? Well, if not, what is it? Ask a country once known for the spirit of innovation and experiment, the United States. American art took chances well before Abstract Expressionism, but only if you agree to call it art. With early American photography at the Met and Shaker craft and a broader tradition of quilting, both at the American Folk Art Museum, a truly American art began before a casual museum visitor may think.
If not art, photography might be photojournalism as a record of its time, literally making history. It might be the portrait you once kept in your wallet before you had a smart phone, to remind you of what it means to love. It might be social media or a science experiment. 
Photography has taken pride in making an influencer, even as it struggled to be more than a meme. It has been struggling in much the same way since well before there were digital media to influence. Now "The New Art: American Photography" heads back to its origins, while American craft stakes its claim to art.
When American meant new
The art of photography was not always new and not often American, but it was always an experiment. The Met draws on a single, mammoth body of work, the William L. Schaeffer collection, which it already calls its own. Selections run from the birth of photography, in 1839, through groundwork for the first New York subway, shortly before 1910. Just outside is a pale, piercing blue that photographers today would hardly recognize. And right at the entrance is an enormous camera. Experimenters had a lot to carry and a lot to learn.
There will be other devices to come, a touch more manageable, in an exhibition divided by competition to define the medium. They differ only in the metal, glass, or paper that offers support and the light-sensitive emulsion that coats the support and makes it work. That includes first daguerreotypes, then ambrotypes and tintypes, which conquered the unreality of reversing right and left. Albumen prints on paper combined portability and a finer resolution soon enough. And that blue is the color of cyanotypes, which anticipate photograms in placing their subjects on photosensitive plates without a lens. If photographers experiments extended the process from direct impressions to street scenes with a subway soon to come, experimenters were ingenious.
Just how much did the experiments differ? Less than you might think, for many a print lost its characteristic color as photographers touched them up with a brush. They were artists after all, just good or bad artists. Alice Austen nurtured the artistry of staged portraits, much as the young model for Alice in Wonderland pouted and posed for Lewis Carroll in England. Yet others scorned Victorian artifice, like Matthew Brady during the American Civil War. War photography offered no escape from dead bodies or marks of the lashes across a slave's back. Just the facts.
Questions have dogged photography ever since, all the more so today. By the time of Modernism, including abstract photography, photography need no longer make excuses to make art. And Postmodernism's critique extended to artistry of all sorts, wherever institutions and collectors cast their eye. The beauty of surfaces and mind games were two sides of the same coin. It was about time someone asked what purposes photography serves, no? But did that lead to acceptance or dismissal?
Some, like Carleton Watkins, cultivated the greatness of the American West and the shimmer of its waters. Josiah Johnson Hawes and John Moran insisted on their work as American and as art. Others saw potential in cities and towns. Every shopkeeper, photographers imagined, deserved a personal record. Group portraits could find an audience with families and communities. Other demands were eminently practical. It was just a short step from the first small paper prints to cartes de visite or "cabinet cards" for businessmen and proper gentlemen.
That still leaves something closer to home—pets, children, and other cuties. The types of photographs truly were social media, long before that had a name. Is it art after all or the antithesis of art? Is it a social or scientific experiment? How about a dog trained to stand with its front paws on the top steps of short platform or ladder? Like a successful posting, it was preaching to the crowd.
Shaking loose
There is not a lot of shaking going on at the American Folk Art Museum, unless it is deep inside one's soul. In fact it can be hard for an outsider to imagine the shaking and quaking that animated prayer meetings of the Shakers and Quakers, giving them their name. One remembers instead the clarity and simplicity of Shaker furniture. One remembers, too, the removal from modern life in the Quakers, a lifestyle that most today would find confining. Others might find it dismissed as retro or nostalgia, for a time after Minimalism in art. Yet a show makes the case for the Shaker esthetic as "Anything but Simple."
There had to have been more than the obvious to that esthetic, for the Shakers lived with it and let it shape their lives. Photos at the museum show objects in their place in homes from which people have long vanished, and one can feel the furniture and people alike close at hand. They did not need to go far in pursuit of a revelation. At the same time, they embraced simplicity as one of the prime virtues along with celibacy, pacifism, and egalitarianism. The combination of esthetic, practical, and spiritual virtues has become an emblem of New England for the Shakers and rural Pennsylvania for the Quakers. It seems as essentially American as Washington crossing the Delaware.
Nor is it entirely passed. Shaker craft opens the exhibition along with the photographs, with all its richness in simplicity, like the wood grain and dark stain of nested oval boxes. Everything fits. Much the same paradox animated Minimalism in the 1960s, for all its industrial esthetic. Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Agnes Martin wanted to keep their hands dirty and their vision clear. That decade also looked to Quaker pacifism in response to the Vietnam War.
Like a viewer today, the Shakers lived in more than one time at once. They began shaking loose in England before taking their millenarian project to the United States in 1774, where they revered a founding figure in Mother Ann, or Ann Lee. There had to be something more, they felt, than the Enlightenment march of time or the hairsplitting of organized religions—and they found it in a perceived act of restoration. Much the same thoughts motivated Hassidic Jews in Eastern Europe in those same years. Like the Quakers, they, too, dress for those years while claiming the very first millennium. The Shakers just happened to turn out art and merchandise worth something today.
They knew it, too, and they meant their "gift drawings" of the mid-1800s for a larger public, for sale as a means of financial support. Yet their images of wreaths, hearts, fruit, and the tree of life also encode the gifts of heaven. They really did know beauty as soul shaking. They can close in on a single leaf or multiply their fruit, in bright, flat colors distinct from both "outsider art" and the brilliant illusion of Baroque still life and Romantic images of nature. Text at times helps to explain the code, barely breaking the symmetry, but you may not need it. Call it the calm after the quaking and shaking.
If the 1960s found something to admire, it may have rendered their austerity all but superfluous. Not that a movement devoted to celibacy had long to live. The movies and metaphors aside, there was no apocalypse now. Their dying off may explain so small a show—alongside selections from AFAM curated by Thornton Dial, the artist, and a packed display of game boards. It could serve as a preamble to the Met's rehanging of its American wing on its hundredth anniversary, but also a rejoinder. Something here still brings stillness and bears fruit.
Adam and Eve start small
Is humanity newly fallen? You might not think so, not humanity of the mid-nineteenth century and not humanity today. Yet an unknown craftsperson in that past century based a quilt on Adam and Eve in the Garden, among the first in "An Ecology of Quilts," at the American Folk Art Museum following the Shakers. It is not the first in the show, which opens in barely a corridor while the museum itself faces expansion and renovation. It is also one of many mysteries in a show stretching from the birth of the republic to the end of the last century. Where, for one thing, are Adam and Eve?
There can only be mysteries in a show that encompasses so many traditions, not to mention art, craft, ecology, and commerce. The museum is guessing that this quilt had its origins in Vermont, but it cannot be certain, and face it: American families have owned any number of quilts by now, proudly. Who is to choose what counts as folk art? I am rather fond of the comforter that keeps me warm through a New York winter. Then, too, where exactly are Adam and Eve, and are they fallen?
I looked high and how but saw only a sparse pattern of mostly floral motifs, along with the sun and phases of the moon. They cling to a green curve snaking symmetrically around the whole, vegetation facing left, right, top, down, and diagonally. I saw no one. The entire show may favor from greenery and patterning for its own sake. Quilting in fact began with plain red and white geometries. and it turns to a collage-like intricacy by the show's end. Flora set a grounding in-between for classic American craft.
One can hardly help, though, looking for Adam and Eve, because a title asks for them. As another title suggests, many who treasured quilting took for granted that vegetation was part of the Tree of Life. It was part, too, of intense observation and art. The Garden of Eden is not even the busiest or the most colorful quilt on display. It cannot match the deep reds of Oklahoma or human-like flowers with what might pass for four feet. Besides, as "ecology" suggests, the first fall is not humanity's last threat to plan for planet earth.
Eventually I found them, or so I think. I had missed them because they are so small. They may be close to scale given the trees, but still barely visible. They are also anonymous and fully clothed—which makes perfect sense, since Adam and Eve felt shame immediately after the Fall. There is more than one version of them, too, suiting a complex story—all in nineteenth-century clothing. They may have lost the world, but it is the world of American families and American craft.
The Folk Art Museum takes care to introduce that world's methods. It stops for displays of sources of materials and sources of color. Quilts, it turns out, could come about from stencils or weaving—and from a single weave or patching. Color and patching alike can give rise to a more fragmented fabric and a greater sense of motion. The museum's large back room gives fully over to the patching and the motion. You decide whether folk art has given over to fine art or to manufacture.
Two motifs stand out in their sheer frequency. Some patterns build up from small horizontal strips, as things fall apart but nothing goes to waste. Other patterns circulate around and in collision with radial spokes. Next to nothing begins at due north. Could designers intend references to machinery itself, the very means of manufacture? Has a fallen species lost its sense of shame?
Early American photography ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 20, 2025. "Anything but Simple" ran at the American Folk Art Museum through January 26, 2025, "An Ecology of Quilts" through March 1, 2026.