Beatrice Mandelman

Although Beatrice Mandelman was not native to Taos, New Mexico, her name is inextricably linked to the area. Mandelman was the leader of the Taos Moderns, a group of artists inspired by the area’s scenery and culture that included Agnes Martin, Edward Corbett, Emil Bisttram, and Oli Sihvonen. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Mandelman studied at the Art Students League of New York. During the Great Depression, she worked for the Works Progress Administration as a muralist and printmaker in a predominantly Social Realist style. Associated with New York School artists like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, Mandelman was included in important exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art. In the 1940s, she relocated to Taos, a hasty move that may have been to evade the FBI, who’d been tracking Mandelman and her husband because of their communist sympathies. In New Mexico, Mandelman began to move toward abstractions inspired by the local landscape and Native American ceremonies. In 1947, she established the Taos Valley Art School.