Edwin and Mary Scheier were born in 1911 and 1908, respectively. Ed attended the New York School of Industrial Arts. Mary studied art in New York City in the late 1920s at Grand Central School of Art, the Art Students League, and the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts. Ed obtained a job with the Federal Art Project of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA). It was through that job that he met Mary in 1937. He was a coordinator who made the rounds to federally funded southern art galleries. She was the director of Big Stone Gap and Abingdon Art Centers, the first Federally sponsored art galleries in Virginia.
The Scheiers married in 1938. They later managed an industrial kiln for the Tennessee Valley Authority project. They were allowed to use the kiln during their time off, and in 1939, left their jobs to set up their own pottery shop in an old log cabin in Glade Spring, Va. In 1940, they won second prize in a national ceramics exhibition in New York and about the same time, they met David Campbell, an early leader of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen. He encouraged the couple to move to New Hampshire and found Edwin a teaching post at UNH, where the arts department was on the brink of a transformation.
From 1940 to 1960, Ed taught and his wife served as an artist-in-residence, sometimes creating up to 200 pieces a day.
In 1968, the Scheiers moved to Oaxaca, Mexico, where Ed Scheier began experimenting with weavings, paintings and carved wood sculptures. Ten years later, they settled in Green Valley, Ariz. and Ed returned to pottery, making some of his biggest and best-known pieces. The Scheiers never had children but, as friends point out, they had each other. The couple worked side by side, sometimes on the same project and sometimes not, for their entire careers. In 1999, Ed Scheier's art took another turn. Concerned about his health, his doctors told him to stop throwing pots. So at 89, Ed taught himself a new medium: what he called "computer painting" where he created striking digital images based on the themes of his earlier work.
Mary passed away at the age of 99 in 2007 with Ed passing away in 2008 at age 97. The pottery of Mary and Edwin Scheier is in museum collections across the country, including the American Craft Museum, the Everson Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, the Ceramic Research Center in Tempe, AZ, the Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, and the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester.
In 2001 Ken Browne Productions released a film on the Scheiers entitled Four Hands, One Heart that aired nationally on many public television stations.
Source: New Hampshire State Council on the Arts
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Edwin and Mary Scheier Pottery Vase