Boxes for everything - Current and Coming - box exhibit, Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

In the course of time, boxes have been made for almost every imaginable purpose in every conceivable size. An exhibition on view at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, surveys boxes made and used in New England from the late seventeenth to the twentieth century. More than fifty examples on view are from the collections off the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities in Boston, where the show was seen earlier, and some are from the collection of the Hancock Shaker Village. The show is entitled Boxes, Open and Shut and may be seen until April 7. It is sponsored by Northeast Auctions, by Ronald Bourgeault.

The Shakers are particularly well known for the oval boxes they produced in some quantity for use in their communities, for sale to outsiders, and to contain the numerous products--herbs, sarsaparilla lozenges, asthma cures--they made for those in the outside world. These boxes are highly regarded today for their meticulous construction, which called for bending wood into an oval shape and affixing the parts with a series of neatly placed tacks. Many of the oval boxes the Shakers produced are vividly painted. Less well known are the boxes they made of other materials such as papier-mache, one of which is included in the exhibition.

The boxes in the show range from storage chests and trunks to an early twentieth-century ice box and a Brownie box camera, which brought photography to the American middle class. Some of the boxes on view have survived with their original contents, among them a tabletop croquet set (illustrated on p.26), and a child's box filled with paper dolls, a teaset, doll clothes, and a paint set. Writing boxes, lap desks, and sewing boxes (some with their original tools) were also made by the Shakers and elsewhere in New England. Bandboxes frequently incorporate decorative papers, and some have the only samples of a particular wallpaper known to survive. American Indians made boxes of tree bark that they embellished with moose hair embroidery These were made as souvenirs for tourists during the nineteenth century.

There is no catalogue of this exhibition.