Mary Ann Scherr teaches a metals program at N.C. State’s craft center, but one would not believe the paths that she took before she finally ended up there.
Scherr gave a short version: “I was an artist starting at the age of five, then I became a designer, then an educator and a goldsmith was last,” Scherr said. “I hadn’t planned to do that.”
According to Scherr, art has been a major inspiration for her throughout her life. She attended the Cleveland Art Institute after high school.During World War II, she went on to be a cartographer for the Navy. Scherr then went to Chicago to be a product designer. She moved to Detroit as an automobile designer for Ford, and back to Ohio to become part of an industrial-design organization and to teach at a university. After that, she was on to another university, Parsons School of Design in New York where she was the director chair of the product design department. She has also taught at Duke and Meredith in her time in North Carolina, where she moved because her husband was ill.
Not only are her past work experiences intriguing, but are her works. She has work displayed at the The Vatican Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.
The Museum of Craft and Design in New York contains several of her pieces as well, including some of her patented body monitors.
According to Scherr, it all began when a woman walked up to her while the woman’s scarf fell away revealing an unappealing piece of equipment on her throat. Scherr was shocked and asked the woman if she could decorate it.
The next piece came about when she was asked to design a costume for a student competing for Miss Universe. They were using the theme “space” for the costume because all the first Americans in space were from Ohio. Scherr was working on the student’s belt, which was elaborate and would theoretically be a monitor for her body if she were in space.
“I was watching the men landing on the moon on television,” Scherr said. “They had a device doing the same thing. That started me thinking about all the possibilities of products for people who had true body issues, not for men in space, and not for that kind of thing, just for us people on Earth.”
Scherr went on to design 11 units total with patents on all of them, most of which are now amongst permanent collections in museums.
Scherr also has had some famous clients. Chelsea Clinton wore one of her cat pins, and Andy Warhol bought her cookie jars.
“Just looking around me and being open to what is there, what is a beautiful poem, what is a beautiful comment, what’s a nice day, what’s a nice cloud, you know, everything matters,” Scherr said. “There is inspiration in everything.”
Scherr specifically got into working with metals when she was in Ohio. She had just had a child and said she was totally bored with everything except the child, and couldn’t stand the routine of the house. So she took a night class, one of the only classes she hadn’t studied in art school, which was metals.
“The minute I touched that metal, I knew that I was sort of where I should be,” Scherr said.
After getting into metals, Scherr then directed her efforts to teaching her interest.
“Teaching students is a design process in itself,” Scherr said. “My whole feeling about being an educator is that I learn as much from students as they learn from me and I value my exposure to minds that are thinking, and I can move along with it. At that point we all discover something.”
