Janine Antoni and Jonathan Berger | Believers: Artists and the Shakers

Janine Antoni and Jonathan Berger are included in Believers: Artists and the Shakers, on view at ICA Boston through August 3, 2025. 

Believers begins with the fruits of an unorthodox residency instigated by curator France Morin during the summer of 1996. Ten artists were invited to live, work, and worship in the only remaining active Shaker community, in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. The residency yielded a dynamic body of works featured in the exhibition The Quiet in the Land, curated by Morin and brought to the ICA by Jill Medvedow in 1998. Believers reunites a core group of works first presented in The Quiet in the Land by artists Janine Antoni, Kazumi Tanaka, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nari Ward, and Chen Zhen—several of which are being remade or reimagined for this exhibition—alongside more recent works by artists Jonathan Berger, Taylor Davis, Gordon Hall, Pallavi Sen, and Cauleen Smith. Believers considers how contemporary artists negotiate the space between received representations of the Shakers and the utopian community’s vital experience as “ordinary people attempting to live an extraordinary life.”

To learn more about the exhibition, please visit the ICA Boston website.