Wearable Possibilities
Ovals necklace and earrings by Mary Ann Scherr PHOTO BY JASON DOWDLE
When it comes to life-monitoring tech, jewelry titan Mary Ann Scherr was ahead of her time BY SAR AH E DWAR D S sedwards@indyweek.com
ALL IS POSSIBLE: MARY ANN SCHERR’S LEGACY IN METAL
Opening reception: Thursday, Feb. 20, 6 p.m. Exhibit through Saturday, Sep. 6 Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh
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February 19, 2020
INDYweek.com
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Mary Ann Scherr at work circa 1970 PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SCHERR FAMILY
ne night in 1969, Mary Ann Scherr was up late working on a design she’d been commissioned to make for Miss Ohio in the Miss Universe competition. She didn’t find beauty pageants particularly stimulating, but while watching the Ohio-born astronaut Neil Armstrong take his first stuttering steps across the moon as an on-screen monitor displayed his heartbeat, she grew inspired. That year, Miss Ohio would walk across the stage wearing a glammed-out spacesuit with a heart-monitoring belt. Such anecdotes, which distill so neatly into parables about beauty, function, and futurism, are the essence of Mary Ann Scherr, who died in Raleigh in 2016 at the age of 94. All Is Possible: Mary Ann Scherr’s Legacy in Metal, a new exhibit that opens on Thursday at N.C. State’s Gregg Museum, honors her legacy, which looms large in the world of jewelry and industrial design, and even larger in the lives of her students. Curator Ana Estrades says that the title of the exhibit is a motto that Scherr often repeated and liked to appliqué into her jewelry designs. A pioneer in the use of exotic materials such as pyrite and titanium, she believed in the unlimited possibilities of metal as well as the possibilities of the lives around her. “It’s not over ‘til it’s over,” jewelry designer Suijin Li remembers her former teacher saying. “Every day over your life, you need to live it fully.” Scherr taught at Meredith College, Duke, and N.C. State, among other institutions. Upon her death, obituaries noted that she was beloved by “thousands” of students. Meanwhile, her far-reaching designs could be found in the permanent collections of The Met, The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Vatican Museums, and in the private collections of Liz Claiborne and the U.S. Steel Corporation. This exhibit, though, is the
first retrospective of her work to be shown in Raleigh, where she lived for the last 27 years of her life. Scherr was born in 1921 to working-class parents in Akron, Ohio. Her mother was a seamstress, her father a skilled mechanic; at the age of 17, he invented a threading mechanism that would be adopted by every rubber company in the world. (Not that the family profited from it: Unaware of the inventions’ potential, he sold the licensing to Goodrich for $1.) Scherr took after her parents and began drawing at an early age; she often used her allowance to buy oversize sheets of paper from a local bakery for drawing. After high school, she interviewed to be a clerk at a local store. The interview went well enough, she thought, but afterward, the owner asked to speak with her mother. “I am not hiring your daughter because if I do, she’ll never go on to study art,” he said. “I’m telling you to let her go to art school.” Upon Scherr’s acceptance into the Cleveland Institute of Art, her parents mortgaged the family home to pay for tuition. There, she began experimenting with different mediums; jewelry was not one of them. “I wanted to be a sculptor and a painter and a designer,” Scherr said in an oral history with the Smithsonian Institution. “I was interested in everything but metals.” Then came the war. She dropped out of school and found work as an illustrator and cartographer, detouring from her visual-art ambitions entirely when she went on the road for a year as a dancer. After the war, she married Sam Scherr, a childhood friend, and was hired as an interior and accessory designer at Ford. She was one of the first— most say the first—female designers at the company, and could have carved out a distinctive career in cars. But she grew restless. “My background reads like a telephone book,” Scherr said. “Because once the work became too familiar, I had to move on and on.” In the late 1940s, she moved to Akron, where Sam Scherr opened up an industrial-design firm, and she became pregnant with their first child. Restless again, she enrolled in a night class for jewelry-making.
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uch of the jewelry popular today has been designed with an eye toward restraint. In catalogs, pearls, pendants, and thin gold rings disappear into the bodies of models. In the middle-class jewelry market of strip malls and snowy Jared ads, only diamond rings stand out as objects engineered to demand attention. They signify romantic attachment, constancy. Once you have a diamond ring on, you’re not meant to ever take it off.
