The--ScheiersEdwin 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. 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.

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Scheier Pottery Vase

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Scheier Pottery Vase

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