Scheier, Edwin and Mary. PLATE. Pottery with sgrafitto and glaze decoration, New Hampshire, mid-20th Century. Signed "Scheier" on the base. 8 1/2 inch diameter, with a 1 1/4 inch wide rim, and with the 6 inch diameter decorated center depressed about 1 inch below the rim. A sgrafitto design of faces and a bird, with brown, blue and black glazes characteristic of early Scheier pieces. In excellent condition: no cracks, chips, dings, flakes or other defects. Edwin Scheier (1910-2008) and Mary Goldsmith Scheier (1908-2007) met while working with the WPA during the Depression. They married in 1937, worked at first as itinerant puppeteers, and opened their first pottery workshop in Virginia in 1939, and moved to New Hampshire in 1940, where they taught for more than 20 years at the University of New Hampshire. In the 1960s, they moved to Oaxaca, Mexico, where their work was influenced by religious and philosophical themes they found in the culture there. In their collaboration, Mary, skilled at creating thin walled thrown vessls and plates, made the pottery, and Edwin developed the glazes and carved the decorations, either as sculpted reliefs or as incised sgrafitto. Sadly, Mary had to stop making pottery in the 1960s because of arthritis and other health problems. The couple retired to Arizona and lived there until their deaths.
