Louis Ribak

Louis Ribak was born in Lithuania in 1902 and immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of ten. During the 1920’s he studied at the Art Students League in New York City with his mentor, John Sloan. He found success in the city as a social realist painter, collaborating with Diego Rivera on a mural in Rockefeller Center, exhibiting at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and participating in the 1934 Venice Biennale.

Ribak worked as a muralist for the Works Progress Administration during the 1930’s. In 1929 he became a founding member of the John Reed Club, an organization dedicated to Marxist thought, art and literature. The following year Ribak joined the Silk Screen Group, a coalition of artists who believed that the print medium was "people's art of the twentieth century.”

In 1944 Ribak married fellow artist Beatrice Mandelman and the couple moved to Taos, New Mexico on the recommendation of John Sloan. The move to Taos marked a shift away from Ribak’s social realist work and towards abstraction. Ribak and Mandelman opened the Taos Valley Art School, where they both taught classes. Students at the school included artists Oli Sihvonen and Edward Corbett.

The couple opened Gallery Ribak out of their Taos home in 1953. They exhibited their own work alongside other artists, including painter Agnes Martin. Along with Martin, Ribak and Mandelman were influential in the development of the group known as the Taos Moderns. Ribak continued to teach and paint until his death in 1979.