Born in Cleveland to a family of foundry workers, Edris Eckhardt began drawing and painting at the age of eight while convalescing from rheumatic fever. Subsequently, she attended children studio classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. After high school, she enrolled in the Cleveland School of Art in 1928, where she met instructor Alexander Blazys, who kindled her interest in clay sculpture. In 1930 she began working at Cowan Pottery. In 1931, on a postgraduate scholarship from the Cleveland School of Art, she studied with sculptor Alexander Archipenko in New York. Eckhardt exhibited in the annual May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1932–67) and throughout the 1930s participated in the annual National Ceramics Exhibitions held in Syracuse, New York. She also showed at the World in Paris and New York. In 1935 she was appointed head of the ceramic division of the Works Progress Administration. For the WPA she created monumental ceramic sculpture for the city’s Woodhill Homes housing project and a series of ceramic figures, inspired by children’s literature, for the Cleveland Public Library. In 1942, after the demise of the WPA, Eckhardt accepted a five-year position as an affiliated instructor at the School of Applied Social Sciences, Western Reserve University, where she taught social workers how to use clay modeling as art therapy. In 1953 she turned her creative energies toward mastering the medium of glass sculpture and exhibited both locally and nationally in the following decades, including solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York (1962) and the Corning (New York) Museum of Glass (1968). A retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Beachwood (Ohio) Museum (1982).
Transformations in Cleveland Art. (CMA, 1996), p. 227