Mandelman's career runs along the seam between two of the great currents of twentieth-century American art, the New York avant-garde of the 1930s and 1940s and the more intimate, place-rooted modernism that emerged in the Southwest after the war, and her work belongs fully to both.
Mandelman's path into art was shaped early by the cultural and political climate of her Newark household. Her early study positioned her to enter the New York art world young, and by her twenties she was working among the most important abstract and figurative painters of her generation. Her time in the WPA placed her inside the network of artists, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Stuart Davis among them, out of which Abstract Expressionism would emerge.
Her WPA work in the Silk Screen Unit was significant beyond her own production. Under Anthony Velonis the unit transformed silk screen from a commercial process into a fine-art medium, and Mandelman was among the artists whose prints established the legitimacy of screenprinting in American museums. By 1941, her work was being acquired and exhibited by major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art.
The decisive change of setting came in 1944, when she and Ribak, visiting John Sloan in Santa Fe, drove up to Taos and decided on the spot to stay. The shift was geographic, social, and stylistic: their home became the de facto gathering place for the artists who would form the Taos Moderns, and the New Mexican landscape, light, and Pueblo aesthetic prompted her own move from socially engaged figuration toward a fully abstract idiom of flat shape, vivid color, and clear edge.
A 1948 year in Paris extended that direction. She studied with Fernand Léger, whose disciplined construction and bold flat color became a permanent reference point in her work, and entered the orbit of the older European avant-garde, including a friendship with Francis Picabia. The Paris experience, layered onto her Taos environment, produced the body of mid-career work, vivid, geometrically organized, deeply colored, for which she is best known.
She and Ribak were also institutional builders within their adopted community. They founded the Taos Valley Art School in 1947 and ran it until 1953, and Mandelman helped organize the Ruins Gallery in 1952 and, soon after, the Taos Artists' Association and its cooperative, the Stables Gallery, institutions that gave the postwar Taos avant-garde the exhibition infrastructure it needed. Her work has continued to be recognized in the decades since her death as one of the more original and underappreciated bodies of twentieth-century American abstraction.