NEW BRITAIN, CT.- The New Britain Museum of American Art presents special exhibition Masterworks of Color: Shaker Painted Furniture and the Art of George Chaplin from February 21 through October 2025.

Joy in Shaker life was expressed through color. Stark black and white photographs led to the persistent misconception that Shaker life was not only dull, but stern and colorless. Life in the community was hard in many ways. Six days of every week were filled with work. Their surroundings were simple, devoid of luxury items. They lived apart from the rest of the World. Yet, austerity did not mean grimness. Shaker life offered converts security, shelter, sustenance, and support, while building a model of heaven here on earth. The wooden objects in the gallery, large and small, and the textiles have color that was applied up to two hundred years ago. These are and were a source of joy in Shaker life up to the present.

Sharing the gallery are paintings by the artist George Chaplin. He had no direct connection to the Shakers, but his works are also an expression of the emotions that respond to color. There is no “narrative” in Chaplin’s works. Their colors are at once diffuse when seen from afar, and intense when seen up close. There is indeed a “conversation” here, a shared conviction that color is not only a journey to somewhere, but in itself a worthy, fulfilling, and thrilling destination. To surround oneself with color is to live joyfully!

The New Britain Museum of American Art is one of only three museums in the U.S. that has a dedicated Shaker Gallery.

Organized by consulting curator M. Stephen Miller, this exhibition is one in a series exploring Shaker craft in dialogue with contemporary art.

For more than seven decades, George Edwin Chaplin has produced an extensive body of paintings and works on paper that explore the wonder and beauty of color. Born in Kew Gardens, New York, in 1931, he spent his early years in Portland, Maine, and Boston, Massachusetts, and was enrolled in courses at the School of the Boston Museum of Arts. After serving in Japan during the Korean War, Chaplin pursued studies with Josef Albers at the Yale School of Art, earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1958 and a Master of Fine Arts in 1960. From 1965 to 1971, he served as Chairman of the Painting Department at Silvermine College of Art in New Canaan, Connecticut; and from 1972 to 1991, he was Director of Studio Arts and a Professor of Fine Arts at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Chaplin has participated in hundreds of exhibitions since the 1960s, both nationally and abroad, and his works are in important public collections, including the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, Connecticut; New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut; Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.