Mansi Shah

Mansi Shah is an Indian American artist and designer born in Ahmedabad in 1983 and based in Twentynine Palms, California. Her practice spans collectible furniture, lighting, ceramics, and sculptural objects, exploring how colour, form, and material can carry humour, memory, and emotion. She graduated with a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2008 and worked in art direction before developing her studio practice. Her experience includes working with Peter Shire at Echo Park Pottery and artist Julia Haft-Candell.

Shah’s approach is intuitive and grounded in making. Working with ceramics, cast glass, tile, wood, and enamelled metal, she allows the behaviour of each material to influence the finished object. Small irregularities, unexpected proportions, and traces of handwork give her pieces an individual character. Her Indian heritage and experience of the California desert inform a practice concerned with how objects feel as well as how they look, bringing warmth and playfulness into everyday surroundings.

Her Mouth Chair expresses this sensibility through an anthropomorphic form carved from solid walnut with hand-turned legs. An open mouth becomes the chair’s structure, while its extended tongue forms the seat, translating a familiar gesture into functional furniture. Her tiled furniture takes a different approach, assembling individually cut and glazed ceramic elements over architectural forms. Across chairs, benches, tables, and consoles, repeated tiles create patterned surfaces whose variations preserve the character of the handmade.

The Meenakari lighting series connects material experimentation with personal memory. Inspired by her grandmother’s enamel jewellery and the craft traditions of Gujarat, Shah shapes copper by hand and applies layers of enamel, bringing colour and metal together in luminous surfaces. Combined with brass components, these lamps explore how light reveals the texture of a worked surface and how materials develop character through use and time.

Shah’s exhibition history includes Object Permanence at Hem in 2019, Under/Over at Marta in 2020, Super Group at Superhouse in 2021, and Some Clouds at A-Z West / High Desert Test Sites in 2023. Her work has also appeared in Architectural Digest through the 2019 Urban Outfitters × Clever collection, for which she created handmade mirrors and glass objects. In 2025, Business of Home profiled her furniture and lighting practice in “This California maker makes room for humor in her work.”

Mansi Shah’s complete catalog available upon request.