Ruth Adler Schnee


Ruth Adler Schnee is an American textile designer and interior designer based in Michigan. She is one of the many founding figures of contemporary textile design in the United States. She is best known for her modern prints and abstract-patterns of organic and geometric forms. She opened the Ruth Adler-Schnee Design Studio with her spouse Edward Schnee in Detroit, which operated until 1960. The studio produced textiles and later branched off into Adler-Schnee Associates home decor, interiors and furniture.

Biography

Ruth Adler was born on May 13, 1923, in Frankfurt, Weimar Republic Germany, to the German-Jewish family of Marie and Joseph Adler. The family later moved to Düsseldorf. They fled Germany shortly after Kristallnacht in 1938 and before the start of World War II. She graduated from Cass Technical High School in 1942.
In 1944 she studied under Walter Gropius at Harvard University, after receiving a fellowship to the Harvard University Graduate School of Architecture and Design. In 1945, she received a bachelor of fine arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design. Adler-Schnee interned with Raymond Loewy in New York City and she received a master of fine arts degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1946, becoming the first woman to receive a graduate degree in architecture from the school. She also won a Chicago Tribune residential design competition in 1946. She studied architecture with Eliel Saarinen at Cranbrook and it was here she became interested in textile design.
In 1948 she married Edward Schnee, a Yale University graduate in economics, and he helped her grow her business. Together they opened the Adler-Schnee home store in Detroit.
In 1952 Adler Schnee worked with Buckminster Fuller on the Ford Rotunda by contributing drapery. Her work was also included in the General Motors Technical Center designed by Eero Saarinen and Minoru Yamasaki's World Trade Center in New York.
She was the subject of a 2010 documentary, directed by Terri Sarris of the University of Michigan.
She was awarded The Kresge Foundation's 2015 Kresge Eminent Artist for lifetime achievement in her introduction of post-war modernism to the Detroit area.
Adler Schnee has a design contract with KnollTextiles, a branch of Knoll.