Sharon C. Mehrman owns and operates a one-woman workshop in Florence, Massachusetts where she designs and builds heirloom quality furniture and historic reproductions. Primarily a self-taught woodworker, Sharon has over 30 years’ experience woodworking, and earned her Master Furniture Maker certificate from the Hill Institute in 2009.
Sharon is a graduate of Parsons School of Design with a BFA in graphic design. In May 2019, Sharon earned a Master’s of Design and a Graduate Certificate in Public History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her self-designed master’s program focused on the design and manufacturing of nineteenth-century woodworking products and the tools of industry, which she complemented with public history – meaning taking history to the public – through museums, historic sites, writing, and teaching. Her research includes material culture (historic artifacts), historic trades, and tools and technology. Her practical experience as a designer, woodworker, and furniture maker informs research and impacts the interpretation of her findings.
Sharon has shown her work in nationally recognized juried craft shows including CraftBoston and Paradise City Arts Festival. In 2011, her Hepplewhite Card Table was juried into an exhibition at the Connecticut Historical Society that featured current works by members of the Society for American Period Furniture Makers. Sharon was awarded Grand Prize in the 2015 Popular Woodworking Magazine Excellence Awards for her Thread Chest, an Art Nouveau inspired piece commissioned by a private collector.
She is one of the voices featured in the audio guide for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s ongoing special installation entitled The Calculated Curve: Eighteenth-Century American Furniture. As part of the 2024 reinstallation of the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Galleries of Eighteenth-Century American Art, located in the museum’s American Wing, Sharon shares her experience as a furniture maker and historian for commentary used in the interpretation of an eighteenth-century Philadelphia tilt-top tea table and a Newport desk & bookcase.