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Passion for clay brings life to Howland woman

Staff photo / Andy Gray Stephanie Sferra of Howland shows off one of the annual Christmas ornaments she’s made since she started working with clay.

Stephanie Sferra went to art school after graduating from Youngstown’s Wilson High School in 1971, but it took nearly 50 years for her to become an artist.

She had plenty to keep her busy in between.

After graduating from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Sferra was hired in 1974 as a part-time graphic designer at the corporate offices of Arby’s, the fast-food chain that got its start in the Mahoning Valley. This was in the pre-computer days when a graphic designer’s primary tools were a T-square, a triangle and a drawing board.

Within a month, it became a full-time job, but using her artistic training didn’t have the appeal she expected.

“Doing it for a living took the fun out of it,” Sferra said during a conversation at downtown Warren’s Trumbull Art Gallery, where she served on its board and spends most of her free time. “But my boss saw I liked to write as well. All of the sudden I was writing training brochures. We were hired to do a newsletter that morphed right away into a magazine. She did the writing and I did the graphics. That morphed into five publications, which morphed into starting Arby’s public relations department.”

Sferra, 69, loved her work.

“I had a job at the beginning of my career that you would aspire to at the end of your career,” she said. “It was hard work, don’t get me wrong, but it was fun.”

It all ended in January 1979, when someone brought Sferra a press release from the copy machine that they assumed she’d written. The press release announced the chain was moving its corporate headquarters to Atlanta.

Sferra had broken off an engagement a couple of months before because she didn’t want to leave her job and move to Connecticut.

“I’m thinking I’ll be Mary Tyler Moore, moving to Atlanta, then I heard the word severance, and came back to real life,” Sferra said. “Do I come to work Monday? ‘No.’ Boom.”

Sferra left the area for work in Marion for couple of years and then returned in 1981, self-employed initially and then working for Sherman & Associates in Warren. When the recession hit in 1985, she was laid off.

“I had to make a decision: Do I go back to being self employed, do I find another agency or do I leave? I left and went to (Washington) D.C. with the last $200 to my name and literally started all over again,” she said.

After a couple of jobs she didn’t like, she started driving a tour bus in the nation’s capital. She loved the job, but when her bosses found out she had a marketing background, they encouraged her to get out from behind the wheel of a bus and work in the office.

“That’s how I got into tourism,” Sferra said.

She was employed by a few transportation companies and spent three years at the Charles County (Maryland) Office of Tourism, but Sferra was looking to come home after 21 years away from Ohio.

“A friend notified me they were looking for a director for the new tourism bureau (in Trumbull County),” she said. “I got hired and came home … I came full circle. Everything I had done at Arby’s, the whole gamut of what I’d done — marketing, advertising, public relations — everything I did I was now doing at the bureau.”

Sferra was director of the Trumbull tourism bureau from 2006 until her retirement in 2018.

Her different career pursuits left no time for art. Two things rekindled it. While at a convention in Columbus in 2016 or 2017, she took a photograph on her walk from the hotel to the convention center. The geometric image was accepted for photography shows at both TAG and the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown.

“I dipped my toe back in,” she said. “It got selected at the Butler and all of the sudden, the bug came back.”

Then a friend gave her a gift certificate to TAG as a retirement gift.

“I decided to use it for a clay class. I got addicted to the medium, and here we are.”

She joined the TAG board around the time of her retirement. When she’s not working on her own pieces, she serves as studio monitor of TAG’s clay studio and gives workshops at the gallery. One of her ceramic pieces is a juror’s award winner in the 56th TAG Annual, which is on display through Oct. 21.

She makes annual Christmas ornaments, wall sculptures, clocks, chimes and other clay pieces.

During the pandemic, she set up a studio on the back deck of her home in Howland. Before TAG reopened to the public in 2021, Sferra and other board members would gather there — masked and socially distanced — to pursue their art projects.

“We’ve all heard people say art is therapeutic,” Sferra said. “It allows you to escape. It (clay) is a medium I never worked in before, but it became addicting because you’re working with your hands. You visualize something in your head, you conceptualize it and you’re bringing it to life.”

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