The daughter of Austrian and German Jewish immigrants, Beatrice Mandelman was introduced to abstract art as a young girl. A friend of her parents, the painter-printmaker Louis Lozowick, returned from Russia with exciting news about the non-figurative Constructivist movement. At age twelve, she began her art studies by taking evening classes at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art. After college at Rutgers University, she continued her formal training at the Art Student's League in New York, working with the lithographer George Pickens.

Through another teacher, the painter Bernard Gussow, she learned more about Cubism and other European modernist schools. In 1935, Mandelman was employed by the WPA, first as a muralist and then as a printmaker with the Graphic Division of the New York Project. As one of the original members of the Silk Screen Unit under Anthony Velonis, she developed new techniques. Working in the WPA until 1942 when it was disbanded, Mandelman created monochromatic lithographs of social realist subjects, but her silkscreen prints are more brilliantly colored with more abstract gestures - the first glimmer of her mature style.

In 1942, she married fellow artist Louis Ribak. Two years later, the couple traveled to Santa Fe to visit his mentor John Sloan, who had recommended the Southwestern climate for Ribak's asthma. After finding Santa Fe too congested, they took a train and a stagecoach to Taos and decided to move there. This dramatic life change removed them from the New York art scene during the nascent period of Abstract Expressionism, but they wanted to separate themselves from the tension they felt there.

Though it was a vibrant art colony, Taos didn't have any galleries that exhibited the most contemporary trends. This initially disappointed the couple, but after World War II artists such as Clay Spohn, Edward Corbett, Agnes Martin, and Oli Sihvonen began to settle in town and eventually became known as the Taos Moderns. Eulalia C. Emetaz opened the Galería Escondida in order to show their work, and Mandelman and her husband founded the Taos Valley Art School and helped create the Taos Art Association.

In Taos, Mandelman flourished as a bold, emotive colorist with her own personal style. Of her path, the artist said, "I'm an original. I broke all the rules. I'm using a very primitive language - squares, circles, triangles, primitive colors. And I made a very sophisticated art out of it." Her legacy continues at the Harwood Museum in Taos, which in 2010 received 133 works gifted from the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation. That same year, the Harwood debuted the Mandelman-Ribak Gallery, an 1100-square-foot gallery presenting temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art.

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