Beatrice Mandelman was born on December 31, 1912, in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish immigrant parents who imbued their children with progressive social values and love of the arts.

In 1924 artist Louis Lozowick, a family friend, returned from a four year sojourn in Europe and Russia and was an important source of information about Russian Constructivism and other avant garde developments abroad.

Mandelman met graphic designer and illustrator Robert Jonas, who introduced her to Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and other New York vanguard artists.

From 1930-32, Mandelman attended New Jersey College for Women in New Brunswick, part of Rutgers University, and then the Newark School for Fine and Industrial Art, where she studied with Social Realist painter Bernar Gussow.

She became one of the original members of the Silk Screen Unit, who, under the leadership of Anthony Velonis, transformed what had been primarily a commercial medium into an artistic one.

[5] Although her style would gradually evolve from Social Realism to abstraction, her works from this period reflect a leftist political bent that continued throughout her life, and would resurface later in a series of collages against the Vietnam War that she created in the 1960s and 70s.

In 1944, Mandelman and her husband visited the artist John Sloan in Santa Fe and traveled up to Taos, which so appealed to them that they impulsively decided to settle there.

[9][10] Far from the strictures of the mainstream art world, Mandelman found the creative freedom to develop her own distinct style, which merged an Abstract Expressionist sensibility with inspiration from the light, color, landscape, and cultures of the American West.

She traveled widely throughout her lifetime, visiting South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa and living for extended periods in Mexico, where she and Ribak would go virtually every year to escape the cold northern New Mexico winters [2] Like many of their contemporaries, including their Santa Fe friend, designer Alexander Girard, they were enamored of folk art and collected it.

[11] Mandelman and Ribak's home served as the gathering place for an informal group of artists who began calling themselves the Taos Moderns.

Mandelman was included in a 1952 group exhibition "Taos Painting Yesterday and Today" at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

Her spirits buoyed by recognition and sales, and propped up by her caregivers as she painted, Mandelman was able to produce thirty-one works comprising the Winter Series.

In 2014, the collection and associated personal papers were donated to the University of New Mexico.,[2] an endowment for future exhibitions and scholarship, and the naming of the Mandelman-Ribak and Caroline Lee and Bob Ellis Galleries at the UNM Harwood Museum of Art in Taos.

The University's Zimmerman Library Center for Southwest Research received the extensive personal papers of both artists, including the notes and poetry written by Mandelman over the years[7]