Sylvia Plimack Mangold

Plimack Mangold was born Sylvia Plimack in New York City, to a family of Jewish background.[1] She is the daughter of Ethel (Rein), an office administrator, and Maurice Plimack, an accountant and businessman.[2][3][4][5] She grew up in Queens, and attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, after high school she was accepted into the program at Cooper Union in 1956. She continued her studies at Yale University and graduated with a B.F.A. in 1961. In the same year she married Yale classmate and fellow painter Robert Mangold.

After studying at Yale with William Bailey and others, Plimack Mangold worked as a representational painter. Her paintings in the early 1960s were paintings of floors, walls and corners, compositions where mirror images were also introduced, making the space more complex. In the 1970s she added trompe-l'œil elements such as metal rulers and masking tape along the borders of the images.

In the 1980s she introduced the images of the landscape to the canvas affixed by the image of masking tape. Eventually, the landscape image filled the entire canvas and focused on individual trees, their branches cropped so as to create the spaces between the limbs and branches of the trees. All the landscape paintings are done from observation. Even as the subject matter of Plimack Mangold's paintings has shifted, her work has always been based in perceptual realism, inviting viewers to observe from up close and mirroring her own process of observation.[6]

Mangold received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1975.[7] Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,[8] the Neuberger Museum of Art[9] at the State University of New York at Purchase, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery,[10] and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and is represented in the aforementioned museums in Boston,[11] Hartford,[12] and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.[13]

• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
• Art Institute of Chicago
• Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX
• Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
• Indianapolis Museum of Art
• Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO
• The British Museum, London
• Minneapolis Institute of Arts
• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
• Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
• Brooklyn Museum, New York
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York
• New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York
• New York Public Library, New York
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City
• Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University
• Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
• Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach

• Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Floors and Rules, 1967–76. Published by Craig F. Starr Gallery, New York, 2016
• Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Landscape and Trees, ex. cat. West Palm Beach, Florida: Norton Museum of Art, 2012 ISBN 978-0943411507
• Sylvia Plimack Mangold. Published by Alexander and Bonin, New York, 2012
• Natural Sympathies: Sylvia Plimack Mangold and Lovis Corinth Works on Paper. Published by Alexander and Bonin, New York, 2009
• The Paintings of Sylvia Plimack Mangold. Co-published by Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo and Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1994 ISBN 978-1555951030
• Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Works on Paper 1968-1991. Co-published by Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University and University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, 1992 ISBN 978-0912303468
• Sylvia Plimack Mangold Paintings 1987-1989. Published by Brooke Alexander, New York, 1989
• Sylvia Plimack Mangold Paintings 1965-1982. Published by Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin, 1982
• Inches and Field. Published by Lapp Princess Press Ltd., New York, 1978

• Dallas Museum of Art
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Castellani Art Museum, work and critical descriptions