These Modern American Design Icons Pay Homage to the Old—and Make It New

Some American contributions to the history of art and design were timeless in their perfection upon arrival. The first 501 jeans Levi Strauss & Co. fabricated around 1890 look fresh on the streets of today. DJ Kool Herc’s mechanical magic trick of connecting two turntables and a microphone some 50 years ago in the Bronx revolutionized how nightlife (and home listening) looks and sounds. Some American design movements coalesced around a few unimprovable objects such as Charles and Ray Eames’s charming chairs or Frank Lloyd Wright’s horizon-wide homes. Along the way they helped define what might be considered the better aspects of the nation’s character: industrious, thrifty, ambitious, and optimistic that, in fact, nothing is unimprovable. And so today’s designers are looking back at those objects, those local movements that hit the big time, to see what might be in store.

Shaker

In the first half of the 19th century, the Protestant United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing formed communal, utopian societies in Ohio, Kentucky, and throughout America’s Northeast. Their adherents came to be known as Shakers for the trembling they experienced while in worship—and the furniture they often sat on while worshiping established a particular, rigorous form of American minimalism. "Shaker beliefs regarding utility and efficiency informed their design constraints," says Savannah College of Art and Design furniture design professor Sheila Edwards, noting the Shaker precept that "beauty rests on utility." "This led to specific and consistent design choices like reduced or eliminated embellishment, wood knobs, [and] thin or tapered elements."

Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, says Shaker style is "tied to a complete philosophy of living that seeks spiritual redemption in addition to aesthetical, environmental, and cultural redemption." With its reliance on warm wood and friendly lines—the gentle curve of a chair back, the smooth expanse of a bench seat that simply goes with the grain—Shaker style has perhaps never been more influential. But its ongoing appeal might lay in the dichotomy of its light appearance and heft of authenticity. "Although there is some European fetishization of Shaker design," Cunningham Cameron says, "I think it’s resonated most with American audiences looking for fastidious historical models." And, perhaps, a bit of redemption.

Patchwork

Artisans, and laypeople, have of course been sewing cloth on other bits of cloth since textiles were invented—but Americans made an art of it. In the 19th century, the enslaved women of Gee’s Bend in Alabama made themselves experts of the craft, along the way inventing an improvisational form of quilting that prefigured the Abstract Expressionist and Op art movements. "The country was in a different economic state. It was really a developing country," at the time, says Lauren Cross, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens’ Gail-Oxford associate curator of American Decorative Arts. "People didn’t have money to buy a big, long, fancy piece of fabric. So you had a piecing together. That kind of instinct is, I think, an American invention." Ever since, bohemians have demonstrated their own creative freedom by picking up where the women of Gee’s Bend left off while giving credit where it’s due. Now, says Cross, "it’s about celebrating their community, that resilience that they had to just keep pushing, keep doing this thing that you love doing, despite what the world is not doing for you."