Educated first as a painter by her father, Fred F. Scherer, and then at the Rhode Island School of Design, Deidre Scherer worked in oils, charcoal and pencil before turning to fabric. In the 70’s while raising her three daughters, she pioneered her narrative approach to thread on fabric, using scissors and sewing machine as drawing tools. She continues to stretch mediums and techniques as with her finger-woven reconfigured works and her collaborations with artist Jackie Abrams.
Scherer’s thread-on-fabric work has been shown in over 200 exhibitions worldwide including solos at The Baltimore Museum of Art; the Maltwood Art Museum, Victoria, BC; and the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY. Her work was featured in Camilla Rockwell’s documentary, Holding Our Own, which was screened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and aired on VPTV.
Her pieces are in publications such as the renowned cover of When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple and throughout OWL’s 2010 Mother’s Day Report. She wrote about the evolution of her art in Deidre Scherer: Work in Fabric & Thread (C&T Publishing, 1998).
She has accomplished private as well as public commissions such as the tableau for St. Mary’s Hospital’s lobby in Rochester, NY, and the portraits of Tuck School’s library directors and founders at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. In numerous private collections, her work is also found at the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Bennington Museum in Bennington, VT; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum; the Heller Museum in New York City; and the Visions Art Museum in San Diego, CA.
Scherer received Arts Fellowships from the Vermont Arts Council and the Open Society Institute, and the 2008 Humanities Award from the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. The Rhode Island School of Design honored Scherer with their 2010 Alumni Association Award for Artistic Achievement “…“for the innovative medium of textile art she has developed, and for her thought-provoking investigations of our society’s views of aging, reflections on life, death, family relationships and the welfare of future generations.”