Shakers

collecting
initials
 

teeny
cross 
stitches
marking

kerchiefs
gloves
mittens
dresses

sure
footed

semblance
of order

circles & lines
circles of chair tape

a whole made  a circle from
a row of chairs

chair tape in the textile collection of the Shaker Museum

circles for today’s flower moon

today I’m setting the table for
my friend’s indigo dyeing class
studio visit
 
walking around the table so many to thank,
including--
-india flint at haystack for her ecoprinting class 
-norte maar & Jason Andrew for showing ‘a year’s worth’
-and later bewilder work with catalog
-everyone that taught & talked to me about natural dyes
-working at Naumkeag with their amazing flower gardens
-being a TA for Kathy Hattori at Haystack and dyeing with
            so many talented dyers
-learning that Shakers wore ‘any color they could dye’ as 
            an artist in residence at Hancock with Smp
-showing not once but twice with like-minded artists
            interested in the Shakers, organized by Albany airport & Eric
-performing meetinghouse with miram at a moonbow event
and later eal publishing it and then adding a podcast
-working with curator Christie Jackson & all at Fruitlands on
‘anything but drab’
 
often one thing leads to another
oftentimes it's just someone’s faith in your work
or just willing to say yes to something never done
but always, I am filled with so much gratitude to all.
Thank you. 

what is poetry?
how does one revise?
how does one make a manuscript?

emily dickinson said, “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.  These are the only ways I know it.  Is there another way.”
[letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson]

i’m playing a poetry game
rearranging words
moving about sentences
reading chanting aloud
working with Heather McKay Young is serious &fun
color charts the way

“a book is a small building”*
 
 
 
within
folds
structures
 
a village
unfolds
 
utopian
colors
collide
 
into a
spectrum

book spines at Historic Deerfield during color research Fellowship using the Stephen L. Wolf Collection. 

roster of reds
recently read
ranges of russet
selections of scarlet
swatches of silk

books from Memorial Library, Historic Deerfield
Shaker objects & textiles, Shaker Museum
.


—Maerz Dictionary of Color
—cupboard over drawers
-Syme, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours
—Shaker Sister Kneckerchief
—Jorgensen Mastery of color
—Shaker oval box
—Chevreul, Des Couleurs
—Shaker survey tool
—The Practical Decorator, George Audsley & Maurice Audsley
—Shaker Sister Neckerchief
—Munsel Book of Color
—Colors, what they are and what to expect of them

all in line
aligned

midnight blue
dove grey
forest green
petal pink
crimson coral
 
I’ve cited
I’ve cleaned
i’ve imagined
I’ve inventoried
 
colors in Dorothy cloaks
colors in poetry manuscripts
 
 
image  Dorothy cloaks Shaker Museum
       Prismatic Utopia, poetry manuscript

color collected:
Stephen L. Wolf Collection
Memorial Library, Historic Deerfield
 
……………………………………

color    as       pie charts
                  dots blots
 
color    as       time keepers
                  palette makers
 
color    as       gridded groups 
                  accented accidents
 
color    as       prism percussions
                  regulated registers
            
color    as       absolute attributes
		  sequenced saturations
                        
color    as       consumer consensus
                  compasses quandaries 
                                                            
color    as       faceted philosophies
		  fascinating phenomena
                        
color    as       tangents into treatises
		  notions into nomenclatures
 
		  color collected


……………………………………………………………


—Munsel, Munsel Book of Color
—Rimington, The Art of Mobile Colour
—Chevreul, Chevreul on Colors
—Chevreul, Des Couleurs
—Hay, Nomenclature of Colours
—Hitchcock, Religion of Geology
—Birren, Color for Interiors
—Field, Field’s Chromatography for Artists
—Gaspard, Theorie des couleurs
—Bustanoby, Principles of Color Mixing
—Walch, Color Source Book
—Jones, Grammar of Ornament
—The Painter’s Handbook
—Wolf Flow Colors, Wolf & Son’s Paints


………………………………………………………………

Thanks Memorial Library/Historic Deerfield for fruitful fabulous fellowship to examine the Stephen L Wolf color book collection. 

NOTE: Application deadline for the 2026/7 Memorial Library Fellowship due April 3, 2026

ot all color research is in color
 
it all started with Newton
 
celebrating
black & white
circles 
diagrams
charts
images
 
from the Stephen L Wolf Collection
aka over 1,200 books on colour
at Historic Deerfield Memorial 
Library Special Collections
 
--Sir Isaac Newton, OPTICKS:  A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, 1718
 
--OPTICKS, rainbows in landscape, note tufts of grass
 
--Ogden Rood, Students Text-book on Color, 1881
 
--Chevreul, The laws and contrast of colors, 1859, 3D!
 
--Vanderwalker, The Mixing of Colors and Paints, 1924
 
--Bonnie Snow and Hugo Froehlich, The Theory and Practice of Color, 1920
 
--Albert Munsell, A Grammar of Color, edited by Faber Birren, 1969
 
--Chevreul, Des couleurs et des leurs applications, 1864.
 
--J W Mausury, Hints on House Painting, 1868, and the invention of the paint can!
 
--Mrs. Merrifield’s the first to translate Cennino Cennini into English, 1844
 
& ends with Newton’s Sun Beam from OPTICKS

[all images from the books in the Stephen L. Wolf Collection, Memorial Library, Historic Deerfield]

Color begins to line up this week
Into rectangles and squares
Into thin lines
Into grids



.
Mills, The Painter’s Handbook, 1887
Jorgensen, The Mastery of Color, 1906
Bonnie Snow & Hugo Froehlich, The Theory and Practice of Color, 192
Cleland, A Grammar of Color Arrangements, 1921
Elizabeth Burris-Meyer, Historical Color Guide, 1938
Faber Birren, Color for Interiors Historical and Modern, 1963
Maerz, A Dictionary of Color

All found in books from the Stephen L. Wolf Collection at Memorial Library, Historic Deerfield.  

This week, I’ve been ‘touching Colours,’ to quote the first book seen–John Hoofnail’s 1764 ‘The Painter’s Companion –found in the amazing Stephen L. Wolf Collection at Historic Deerfield Memorial Library. 
 
Wolf owned and operated S. Wolf’s & Sons, a NYC family business began in 1869. He built the premier private library on all things color and paint and varnish and theory, including Newton, Syme, David Hay, George Field, Chevreul, Munsell, Burris-Meyer—just to name a few. 

I am so thankful for my Library Research Fellowship to use the Wolf Collection for my project Prismatic Utopia. Reading these books will further situate the Shaker’s cutting-edge use of color in the early 1800s, during the age of ‘harmonious colour.’
 
Images
--Field, Chromatic Equivalents 
--Hay, The Laws of Harmonious Colouing
--Kyan, Elements of Light
--Church, Colour
--Syme, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours
--Hay, Nomenclature of Colours
--Masury’s Ready-made paints
--Chevreul, Des Couleurs
--Bacon, Theory of Colouring
--Field’s, Chromatography
--Hoofnail, The Painter’s Companion
 

Find more information on the Library Fellowships, here

a scheme of colors

A project; a contrivance; a plan of something to be done; a design.  Thus we may say to form, a scheme, to lay a scheme, to contrive.

A representation of the aspects of the celestial bodies.

I’m scheming in colors.
I’m arranging folders.
I’m packing poems into suitcases.
I’m lining up little watercolor tins

I’ll be scheming in colors as a Library Research Fellow
at Historic Deerfield using their Wolf Color book collection

 [Moses Harris, ‘scheme of colours’ found in Alexandra Loske’s ‘The Book of Colour Concepts ]

[scheme definition 1828 Websters]