Beatrice Mandelman

B. Newark, NJ, 1912
D. Taos, NM, 1998

Beatrice Mandelman was an artist whose abstract paintings and collages are associated with the group known as the Taos Moderns. She was also a founder of the Taos Valley Art School. Her early paintings feature richly textured surfaces and a subtly modulated, often subdued color palette. The New Mexico landscape and culture had a profound influence on Mandelman's style in later works, producing brighter palette, more crisply defined geometric forms, and flatter surfaces.

Mandelman attended Rutgers University and the Art Students League in New York, where she was also employed by the Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Project (WPA-FAP) as a muralist and then as a printmaker in the Silk Screen Unit. During her time in the WPA, she was actively involved in the New York art community among artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Arshile Gorky. By 1941, her works were included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Art Institute, and The National Gallery of Art. In 1944 Mandelman moved to Taos, New Mexico, with her artist husband Louis Leon Ribak in 1944.

Her work is included in many major public collections, including large holdings at the University of New Mexico Art Museum and Harwood Museum of Art.