"Promey's book is a penetrating analysis of Shaker art. . . . The book is a gem, a true advance in Shaker studies, art history, religious history, and cultural history. Highly recommended." -Choice

" . . . a very intelligent and articulate . . . treatment of a stunning set of message-images." -Art Bulletin

"This book is a pleasure to look at and to read." -Religious Studies Review

"[A] fascinating investigation into another world. The Shaker spirit drawings . . . offer clues into a remarkable moment of American life, as well as an opportunity to rethink just how the visual arts, religious revitalizations, and social memory relate to one another. . . . [A] model study: clear, absorbing, and significant." -Neil Harris, author of The Artist in American Society

"Sally Promey's inquiry . . . critically engages current issues in the study of visual culture: what do images do; how do they work; what needs do they fulfill; just what is their 'power'? Her compelling case study joins fundamental concerns of art historians with those of students of religion and history . . . By means of an exacting examination of Shaker drawings as the site of both expectation and encounter, Promey successfully situates these Spiritual Spectacles at the meeting point of the 'inner' and the 'outer' eye." -Linda Seidel, author of Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon

"Promey has brought to her work an excellent sensitivity to the religious issues involved, keen sight and powers of observation, and a very creative interpretive framework." -Stephen J. Stein, author of The Shaker Experience in America

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 1994Winner: 1994 Charles C. Eldredge Prize of The National Museum of American Art

About the Author

SALLY M. PROMEY is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Reviews
Promey's book is a penetrating analysis of Shaker art. Her major thesis is that the apparently contradictory emergence of graphic images in this explicitly nonmaterialistic religious society is, in fact, sensible in terms of the third generation's need for visible (and thereby real) connection to the original charisma of the society's founders. The images, acceptably constructed as a form of Shaker holy writ, conflated the past with the present by making the saints of the earlier era concurrent with the later generation. Promey exquisitely uses dense analysis of Shaker and world sociocultural contexts to clarify the structure, function, and meanings of the images. She appropriately contextualizes the images with regard to important theological and ideological constructs basic to Shakerism, e.g., order and gift. Further, she refines current terminology by embracing many of the heretofore disparate graphic forms within her term gift images. Promey admirably uses Turner's anthropological models of liminality, but she might have benefited from grounding her discussion of charismatic institutionalization in Weberian sociology. The book is a gem, a true advance in Shaker studies, art history, religious history, and cultural history. Highly recommended. General; undergraduate; graduate. -J. B. Wolford, Indiana UniversityPurdue Univ., Indianapolis, October 1993



Book Information
ISBN 9780253346148
Author Sally M. Promey
Format Hardback
Page Count 326
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press