Sylvia Plimack Mangold (born 1938)
is an American
artist
An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts o ...
,
painter
Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...
,
printmaker
Printmaking is the process of creating artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand processed technique ...
, and
pastelist. She is known for her
representational depictions of interiors and
landscape
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or human-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes th ...
s.
Life and career
Sylvia Plimack was born in
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
to a family of
Jewish
Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...
background. She is the daughter of Ethel (Rein), an office administrator, and Maurice Plimack, an accountant and businessman. She grew up in
Queens
Queens is the largest by area of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City, coextensive with Queens County, in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. Located near the western end of Long Island, it is bordered by the ...
, and attended the
High School of Music and Art in
Manhattan
Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...
, after high school she was accepted into the program at
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly known as Cooper Union, is a private college on Cooper Square in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-s ...
in 1956. She continued her studies at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...
and graduated with a
B.F.A. in 1961. In the same year she married Yale classmate and fellow painter
Robert Mangold.
She is the mother of
film director
A film director or filmmaker is a person who controls a film's artistic and dramatic aspects and visualizes the screenplay (or script) while guiding the film crew and actors in the fulfillment of that Goal, vision. The director has a key role ...
/
screenwriter
A screenwriter (also called scriptwriter, scribe, or scenarist) is a person who practices the craft of writing for visual mass media, known as screenwriting. These can include short films, feature-length films, television programs, television ...
James Mangold
James Allen Mangold (born December 16, 1963) is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Noted for his versatility in tackling a range of genres, Mangold made his debut as a film director with ''Heavy (film), Heavy'' (1995), and gai ...
and musician Andrew Mangold.
Mangold’s work was included in the 1971 exhibition ''
Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists'' held at
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the 2022 exhibition ''52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone'' also at the Aldrich.
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.
Mangold received a grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the feder ...
in 1975. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the list of largest art museums, 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 painting ...
,
the
Neuberger Museum of Art at the
State University of New York at Purchase
The State University of New York at Purchase, commonly referred to as Purchase College or SUNY Purchase, is a public liberal arts college in Purchase, New York. Established in 1967 by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, SUNY Purchase is one of 13 compr ...
, and the
Buffalo AKG Art Museum
The Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly known as the Albright–Knox Art Gallery, is an art museum located adjacent to Delaware Park-Front Park System, Delaware Park, Buffalo, New York, Buffalo, New York, United States.
The museum shows modern art a ...
(formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery).
Mangold received the 2007 Cooper Union President’s Citation Award and was inducted into The Cooper Union Hall of Fame in 2009.
Selected collections
*
Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. The museum is based in the Art Institute of Chicago Building in Chicago's Grant Park (Chicago), Grant Park. Its collection, stewa ...
* Brooklyn Museum,
New York
* Buffalo AKG Art Museum
*
Indianapolis Museum of Art
*
Kunstmuseum Winterthur,
Switzerland
*
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...
,
New York
* Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth,
TX
* Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
*
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. The permanent collection of the museum spans more than 5,000 years of history with nearly 80,000 works from six continents. Follo ...
* The Museum of Modern Art,
New York
*
Nelson-Atkins Museum,
Kansas City, MO
*
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's lar ...
* Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
* Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford
* Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York
* Yale University Art Gallery,
New Haven
Selected bibliography
* ''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
* ''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
* ''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
* ''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
References
Sources
Biography, National Museum of Women in the Arts*
External links
''Schunnemunk Mountain'', Dallas Museum of Art
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mangold, Sylvia Plimack
1938 births
Living people
Cooper Union alumni
Yale School of Art alumni
American modern painters
Jewish American artists
The High School of Music & Art alumni
Artists from New York City
20th-century American women artists
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters