Beatrice Mandelman was one of the most accomplished American abstractionists of the postwar generation, a former WPA printmaker whose move to New Mexico in 1944 helped establish Taos as one of the unexpected centers of mid-century American modernism.
Beatrice Mandelman (December 31, 1912 – June 24, 1998) was an American modernist painter and printmaker, born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish immigrant parents who instilled a strong commitment to the arts and to social justice. She began formal art study at the age of twelve at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art and continued at Rutgers University and the Art Students League in New York. Between 1935 and 1942 she worked for the Works Progress Administration, first as a muralist and then as one of the original artists in the Silk Screen Unit, helping to transform the medium from a commercial process into a recognized art form.
In 1944 she and her husband, the painter Louis Leon Ribak, settled in Taos, New Mexico, where they became central figures in the loose group of artists later known as the Taos Moderns, a circle that included Edward Corbett, Agnes Martin, Oli Sihvonen, and Clay Spohn. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Denver Art Museum, the Harwood Museum of Art, and the University of New Mexico Art Museum, among others.