Presented by Make Hauser & Wirth, ‘CRADLED’ opens 20 November at the gallery’s Downtown Los Angeles location. Conceived and curated by artist Suzanne Bocanegra and actor/producer Frances McDormand in collaboration with Shaker Museum (Chatham, NY), the exhibition expands on its 2024 staging in upstate New York. The Los Angeles presentation of ‘CRADLED’ explores—through objects, sound, and activations—the Shakers’ embrace of caregiving and community from cradle to grave. ‘CRADLED’ invites visitors into an environment where they are immersed, however briefly, in a vision of life shaped by the Shaker ethos of devotion made manifest in communal industry and care.
‘CRADLED’ will be on view Saturdays and Sundays, 22 November 2025 through 4 January 2026.
Central to the exhibition are Shaker cradles, crafted for infants and adults alike, designed to provide comfort at life’s beginning and at its end. From their arrival in the United States in 1774 and through more than two centuries of piety, the Shakers’ celibate communities often sheltered more elders than children, thus developing a deeply rooted culture of end-of-life care. Rarely seen beyond traditional Shaker circles, adult-sized cradles, striking in their simplicity, embody the group’s values of compassion, dignity and support at every stage of life.
The exhibition, inspired and informed by Bocanegra’s and McDormand’s research at Shaker Museum, features four of these historic Shaker cradles, on loan from Shaker museums spanning the country, from New England to Kentucky. Each cradle is paired with a tableau of Shaker rocking chairs and woven baskets filled with mending projects, offering visitors an opportunity to take part in the literal and figurative act of mending, an activity at the heart of Shaker values: to sit, to repair, to create.
Honoring the Shakers’ connection between song and caregiving, Bocanegra and McDormand collaborated with composer David Lang and sound editors Skip Lievsay and Paul Umstrom on an end-of-life lullaby that resonates throughout the exhibition. Lang adapted the text for his ‘last lullaby’ from a Shaker spiritual about eternal life.