Present to us in elegant chairs and tables, simple baskets and colorful quilts, the Shakers are the quintessential American utopians. Judged on longevity, they are the most successful. The Beinecke Library's first exhibition of the new millennium, No Place on Earth , takes as its subject the American utopian dream, as expressed by the Shakers as well as some twenty other groups across four centuries. From 1620, when a band of Calvinist Pilgrims launched an experiment in communal living at Plymouth Plantation, to the contemporary quest for concord and fellowship in the virtual world of cyberspace, Americans have sought a better place.
The exhibition, which will be on view at the Beinecke Library from January 28 through the end of March, was organized by Patricia C. Willis, curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature, with the assistance of Yale College seniors Micaela Blei and Michael Kavanagh. Included in the display are books, letters, photographs, printed ephemera, and a CD-Rom presentation.
"There is something very American about the utopian movement," says exhibition organizer Michael Kavanagh. "The New World was the land of the frontier, that clean, clear space beyond which one could remake oneself into a better human being. America itself can be seen as the biggest utopian experiment of all--embodied in the credo of the Land of Opportunity is the promise that it is always possible to reinvent one's relationship to society, work, and nature."
The earliest utopian experiment represented in the exhibition is the New Haven theocratic community founded by John Davenport in 1638. In all, about 25 utopian experiments are documented in the display, including various Pennsylvania German groups; the Shakers (1784); George Rapp's Harmony (1805); Robert Owen's New Harmony (1825); Brook Farm (1841), depicted in Nathaniel Hawthorne's satirical novel of 1852, The Blithedale Romance ; the Kingdom of St. James (1844-56), a schismatic Mormon group led by James Jesse Strang; Kaweah (1885-92), a Marxist community that settled in what is now Sequoia National Park; Peace Mission (1932-73); and Drop City (1965), a hippie community in Trinidad, Colorado, known for its geodesic domes inspired by Buckminster Fuller.
"No Place on Earth" also includes an interactive CD-Rom presentation about Llana del Rio, a Socialist community founded in 1914 near Los Angeles. New York artist Brian Tolle used archival documents from the Beinecke collection to create images, in virtual space, of what the community might have looked like, had it been successful in achieving its goals. The CD was designed by Brian Clyne, who also provided some of the photographs. Brian Tolle's sculptures inspired by his research into the history of Llana del Rio are currently on view at the Shoshona Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles.
Another section of the Beinecke exhibition is devoted to literary and philosophical representations of utopias, beginning with the first edition of More's Utopia (1516). Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776) finds a place in this sequence of utopian thought as does Thoreau's Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Arthur C. Clark's Childhood's End (1953), and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Exhibition organizer Micaela Blei traces the progress of the American utopian dream: "In a sense, utopian and dystopian literature has evolved along with the national imagination," says Blei. "Our fascination with technology and the exploration of space, a new frontier, has made science fiction writers the modern utopians. Authors like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke imagine the possibilities for social perfection in the great wilderness of space. More recently, as computer technology and the internet opened up a whole new sphere of discovery, cyberpunk authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson have portrayed the newest frontier, cyberspace--an infinite realm with infinite possibilities for the utopian dream."
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