The Metal Magic of Jewelry and Design Titan Mary Ann Scherr

One 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: 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. 

Much of the jewelry that is popular today has been designed with an eye toward restraint. In catalogs, pearls, pendants, and thin gold rings melt 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. 

Scherr’s designs rebuff tradition. They’re not diminutive, and most pieces on display at The Gregg would be impractical to wear on a daily basis. There is an imposing physicality about the way her signature cuffs take up space on a wrist or neck. They look royal and assertive and a little wild, like jewelry you might find in the wreckage of a Viking ship. 

When admiring certain designs, it is easy to find evidence of her past career in the automotive industry. The flash and heft of a hubcap are always close at hand. 

By definition, many of these one-of-a-kind designs are couture, but that category doesn’t feel right for Scherr’s work, which firmly pushed form into function. Jewelry was art, yes, but it was also more than art: It was something that could be essential to living. 

Miss Ohio’s belt was only one of Scherr’s forays into wearable and bio-sensing technology; on display at The Gregg are a sleep detector and an electronic oxygen pendant. A 1981 New York Times piece detailed Scherr refashioning hospital-issue medical hardware into necklaces for women who’d had tracheostomies, which she described as “compassionate jewelry.” Prices started at $100. 

In 1982, while Scherr was chair of the product-design department at Parsons, she helped create a series of jewelry designs that monitored vital functions. In an interview about the designs later that year, Scherr anticipated the dawn of technology like the Fitbit and the Apple Watch. 

“The time will come when life-monitoring jewelry will be as common as wristwatches, and no one will think of leaving home without a heart or air monitor,” she said. “I can already envision a bracelet or ring that would be a time-piece, a body monitor, and a telephone.” 

By the 1980s, she had earned considerable clout in the New York art world, with a client list that included Vice President Walter Mondale, the Duke of Windsor, and Andy Warhol, who bought one of her cookie jars for his collection. (When it appeared in the background of a prominent picture in the Times, the value of her jars skyrocketed.) She and Sam shared a 5,000-square-foot Soho loft on Broadway Avenue. She was at the height of her career. 

And then, they packed their belongings and moved to Raleigh. 

Famously tiny, draped in black, her wrists webbed with gold-and-silver designs, her feet outfitted in stilettos, Scherr stood out in North Carolina. Moving south from New York in one’s sixties is not a seamless endeavor. 

“She came here kicking and screaming,” her daughter Sydney Scherr says. 

Sam’s health had deteriorated, though, and all three of the couple’s children lived in Raleigh. Scherr had connections with the state from teaching at the Penland Center for the Arts. It made sense. 

And soon, with the distractions of New York behind her, she threw herself into yet another chapter of that immense telephone book of a life. With more time to spend in the studio, her work became more “introspective,” as she put it. In 2002, Sam died, and in her widowhood, Mary Ann continued to pour her life into the Raleigh arts community. She served on the city council’s art commission, joined the Raleigh Fine Arts Society, and cofounded the Roundabout Art Collective. She also continued to teach into her nineties, a vocation that she called a “design in itself.” 

“She was very devoted as a mentor and teacher,” says Ana Estrades. “She felt like it was the face of her legacy.”

Years ago, Scherr gave a sterling silver “All Is Possible” cuff to Suijin Li, who will be teaching a metals workshop in conjunction with the exhibit at the N.C. State Crafts Center this spring. The birthday gift is on display at the Gregg.  

“She actually made me promise when she was on her deathbed, you need to carry this on, you need to figure out what you want to do,” she says. “She was always pushing people forward in a good way.”

Scherr’s daughter Sydney remembers hiding beneath her mother’s desk as a child, watchfully copying her sketches. Sometimes Sydney would nibble on matches as the two worked.

“My mother was a terrible cook,” she says. “They probably tasted better than her cooking.”

But her mother’s domestic aptitude had no effect on how Sydney saw her. As with many of the people who came into contact with Scherr, Sydney has gone on to a career in jewelry design. And as with many of the people who speak about Scherr, light is the frame of reference. Metal seeks luster; so did Mary Ann Scherr.

“She was the light of my life,” Sydney says. “In literally everything she did, I followed in her footsteps. She was this beacon.” 

Contact deputy arts + culture editor Sarah Edwards at [email protected]. 

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