Mandelman's Modern New Mexico

The Shape of Place: Modernism in New Mexico

Exhibition Dates: May 8 - June 6, 2026

Opening Reception: Friday, May 8 5-7pm

Weems is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition featuring artworks by the esteemed “Taos Modern” Beatrice Mandelman and her husband Louis Ribak, alongside new works by present day artists Karlton Johnson, Carol Estes, and Susan Klebanoff, carrying forward the ideals and principles of Modernism while creating and living in New Mexico.

Beatrice Mandelman, Still Life with Guitar, c. 1946, oil on canvas, 20 x 32 inches

Born in 1912 in New York, Mandelman encountered and absorbed the burgeoning ideas of Modernism in New York and Europe, befriending artists like Willem de Kooning and Francis Picabia. In 1944, she and Ribak, also an artist, traveled to New Mexico for a month's stay. That month turned into a lifetime of living and painting in Taos.

Mandelman and the Taos Moderns resisted the pressure to paint natural landscapes like many of their contemporaries. Instead, she and Ribak produced an immense body of work exploring core Modernist ideas, like distilling shape and color to its most simple, organic forms. Mandelman believed that through abstraction, an artist could "express a utopian belief in the equality of all people".

Karlton Johnson, Rite of Passage, mixed media collage on archival paper, 14 x 17"

Contemporary artists Karlton Johnson, Carol Estes, and Susan Klebanoff, working with different materials and surfaces, communicate their artistic perspectives with these ideas from Modernism: rearranging perspective across space, a collapse of realism to the most universal forms, and using collage and "automatic" art-making as a part of practice. On view will be paintings on canvas, artist sketches, framed works on paper, woven sculptures, unframed works on paper and, personal items from the Mandelman home and studio.