The ceramics of Mary and Edwin Scheier have been called the products of “happy interdependence” (Browne, 2001). Mary and Edwin are a husband and wife team who met during the Great Depression and went on to make art together for decades. Although their art evolved through the years, some threads of similarity run through their work. Below is a vessel made by the Scheiers in the 1940s. It is a wide-mouthed vessel decorated with a pattern of a person inside a fish.

The vessel below, in the collection of Arizona State University’s Ceramics Research Center, was made forty years later. The profile of the wide-mouthed vessel is quite similar and the theme of person inside fish is a variation of the theme the Scheiers used in the 1940s.

Edwin and Mary Scheier, American, vessel, ceramic, 13 1/4” by 7 1/2”, purchased with funds from Stéphane Janssen Art Foundation, Arizona State University Art Museum

How did these two people meet and what has sustained their artistic productivity for so many years?

In 1908 Mary Goldsmith was born, the seventh of nine children, in a small town in Virginia. She remembers looking at artworks reproduced in books and magazines in her childhood home. At the age of 18, Mary went to New York City to study art. After she studied a year in Paris, she returned to New York, where she got a job in advertising. Still dreaming of making her living as an artist, she visited the art galleries and museums of the city. “One day while at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she was looking intently at a case filled with ancient Chinese vases. Click to view a 1000-year-old Chinese bowl acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1918. Unknown to her, a young man, just as intent in his examination of the Chinese pottery, was walking around the case from the other direction. Mutually immersed in their observations, they bumped into each other and struck up a conversation; the young man was Edwin Scheier” (Komanecky, 1993, p. 32). Five years later they met again in Virginia and were married.

Ed Scheier’s father died shortly after Ed was born, second of two children, in the Bronx New York in 1910. His family was poor. In spite of his impoverished childhood, Ed managed to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As it turns out, both he and Mary enjoyed looking at suits of armor made for horses in the Middle Ages. Click to view a suit of armor that Ed and Mary might have seen when they visited the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of arms and armor. Because he needed to work, he did not go to high school. He had lots of jobs including Chinese food delivery boy, factory worker, baker, and bell boy. During the Depression he traveled far and wide in search of work. “I went across to the West Coast a couple of times, bumming and hitchhiking, when I was fourteen or fifteen. I was pretty much on my own. I got a job on a boat, went through the Panama Canal, up to New Orleans. But that was not uncommon. At the time there were all sorts of jobs you could pick up along the way” (Komanecky, 1993, p. 33).

Back in New York, when he was 19, Edwin Scheier studied silversmithing. He also worked for a ceramist. He continued to educate himself by going to free lectures several times a week at the Cooper Union. Click to learn about the Cooper Union’s history of educational program and the many programs still offered by the Cooper Union. In order to express his political views, he started staging puppet shows in Union Square. Eventually he was hired by the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, in programs to help desperately poor people during the Depression. He taught crafts classes to young men working in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

It was through Ed’s work in the WPA that he once again met Mary, who had returned to Virginia where she was running the Big Stone Gap Federal Art gallery.

Ed was appointed Field Supervisor for the Southern States of the Federal Art Project. One of his trips through the South brought him to the gallery where Mary served as director. They were married and began a life-long partnership in art.

The Scheiers moved to Tennessee where they worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority Art Center and began developing their skills with ceramics. Mary used a potter’s wheel, sometimes throwing as many as 200 pieces in a day.

Ed experimented with various ceramic techniques.

He made small ceramic figures to sell along with Mary’s pots. His sculpture of Androcles and the Lion was made using the slip-casting method.

Ed made the ceramic horse and rider below in 1942.

The clay sculpture below combines a curled platter surrounding two lovers formed from clay cylinders. The semicircular arch suggests a puppet theater, while the small figure at the bottom suggests a puppeteer with a tiny figure in the palm of each hand.

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