The Shaker exhibition at the ICA in Philadelphia collapsed distinctions between the handmade, the technological, the spiritual, and the computational.

One of the works that reorganized my thinking was by Kameelah Janan Rasheed, whose embroidered and printed textile works are informed by the writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson, founder of the Black Shaker community in Philadelphia. The text in the works hovers between visibility and disappearance, legibility and abstraction, as though language itself is being carried across time imperfectly.

Seeing these works brought me back to Rasheed’s installation in Greater New York at MoMA PS1, which felt immersive, spatial, technological, and infrastructural in an entirely different way. And yet the connection between the two bodies of work feels direct.
Born in East Palo Alto in the center of Silicon Valley, there is something about the logic of Rasheed’s work that feels connected to both weaving and circuitry, to textiles and systems of information. The embroidered surfaces read almost like code, transmission, memory, or early computational language.

Looking at the works, I kept thinking about how knowledge travels. Through text. Through labor. Through repetition. Through spiritual practice. Through archives that are incomplete and histories that survive partially, unevenly, and collectively.

The exhibition suggests that technology is not separate from craft and never has been. The handmade object, the woven structure, the stitched mark, and the coded system all exist closer together than we often imagine.

More than a historical exhibition, the show becomes a meditation on how meaning is preserved, transmitted, obscured, and rediscovered across generations.

‍