Sylvia Plimack Mangold (born September 18, 1938) is an American artist, painter, printmaker, and pastelist. She is known for her representational depictions of interiors and landscapes.
Sylvia Plimack was born in New York City, grew up in Queens, and attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. She intended to study nursing at Hunter College, but her parents encouraged her to pursue her interest in art, and 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, Mangold worked as a representational painter. Her paintings in the early 1960s were photorealistic renderings of floors, compositions characterized by hard-edged angles into which mirror images were introduced, making more complex the works' illusionism. In the 1970s Mangold began painting landscapes near her home in Washingtonville, New York, and added trompe l'oeil elements such as metal rulers and masking tape along the borders of the images. Beginning in the 1980s, the landscape paintings focused on individual trees, their branches cropped so as to emphasize abstract shapes, yet based on observation from nature.[1]
Mangold received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1975. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Neuberger Museum of Art at the State University of New York at Purchase, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and is represented in the aforementioned museums in Boston, Hartford, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
She is the mother of film director and screenwriter James Mangold.