04/21/2026
Please join us Friday May 8th! Weems is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition featuring artworks by the esteemed “Taos Moderns” Bea Mandelman and her husband Louis Ribak, alongside new works by contemporary artists Karlton Johnson, Carol Estes, and Susan Kelbanoff, carrying forward the ideals and principles of Modernism while creating and living in New Mexico.
Mandelman and the Taos Moderns cohort resisted the pressure to replicate the literal replication of natural landscapes contrary to many of her contemporaries. Instead, she produced a prolific body of work connecting the core Modernist idea of distillation of shape, form and color to her belief that abstraction helps to “express [a] utopian belief in the equality of all people”.
Contemporary artists Johnson, Estes, and Klebanoff, working with different materials and surfaces, communicate their artistic perspectives using core Modernist ideas: flat assembly of 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 items from the Mandelman home and studio.
Sales of works sold from the Estate benefit The UNM Foundation.
