Cooper Hewitt says...
Ruth Adler Schnee (American b. Germany, 1923) has had a long and prolific career as an interior designer and space planner, textile designer, and modern design retailer.
After her family’s home in Dusseldorf was destroyed during the Kristallnacht pogrom, and her father briefly detained at Dachau, the family fled to the United States, and settled in Detroit. Showing early promise in art, she studied at Cass Technical High School, graduating in 1942. In 1944 she received a fellowship to the Harvard University Graduate School of Architecture and Design, where she studied under Walter Gropius. She was granted a full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1945.
After winning Vogue magazine’s “Prix de Paris” competition in 1945, she was given a position with the industrial design firm of Raymond Loewy in New York City, where she worked alongside designers Warren Platner and Minoru Yamasaki, who became a lifelong friend, and with whom she later collaborated on the World Trade Center. She returned to Michigan when she received a fellowship to the Cranbrook Academy of Art to study architectural design under Eliel Saarinen, becoming the first woman to earn an architecture degree from Cranbrook in 1947.
Despite these early successes, she found that few firms were willing to hire women. Instead, she gained notice for the textiles she designed for a Chicago Tribune design competition. With a deposit on an initial order, she opened a studio and began designing hand-screen printed textiles for the modern interior, with colorful organic or geometric patterns.
In 1948, she married Edward Schnee, who joined her in her textile printing business, and with whom she opened Adler/Shnee, a design store, where they were among the first to sell modern furniture, fabrics, and home furnishings in the Detroit area. She also continued to work as an interior designer, and collaborated with many of the most influential architects of the period, including Eero Saarinen, Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright, Minoru Yamasaki, and George Nelson. She remains active today, creating textile designs for Knoll Inc.
Ruth Adler Schnee has received numerous awards, including the Women in Arts Award for a lifetime contribution to the arts in 2002; she was also named the Kresge Eminent Artist for 2015. Her work has been included in many exhibitions including Design 1935 – 1965: What Modern Was, The Cranbrook Vision, and Ruth Adler Schnee: A Passion for Color, and is in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Walker Arts Center, among others.
