Director and Curator of Special Collections and Archives Christian Goodwillie was recently featured in the original documentary Defining Expertise: The Design of 19th-Century Shaker Communities (Heaven on Earth). The film is the first in a series produced for DesignMiami 2020, an annual forum for design that brings together collectors, gallerists, designers, curators, and critics from around the world in celebration of design culture and commerce.
Goodwillie was interviewed in the 1794 meeting room of the Shaker meetinghouse at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Mass. The meeting room was repainted under Goodwillie’s direction in 2005 with hand-ground Prussian blue paint to recreate the Shakers’ original interior treatment. Hancock Shaker Village Curator of Collections Sarah Margolis-Pineo and antiques dealer John Keith Russell also appear in the film.
“The Special Collections of Hamilton College have become the hub for new research into the Shakers due to the Communal Societies Collection, as well as the Richard W. Couper Press, which has published 16 monographs on the Shakers, and more than 50 articles in American Communal Societies Quarterly,” Goodwillie notes.
