Born in New York in 1938, Sylvia Plimack Mangold grew up in Queens where her father owned a small business while her mother managed the household. Her parents believed that education was essential, and sought the best opportunities for their children.

While in fourth and fifth grade, Mangold attended weekly children’s art classes at The Museum of Modern Art where she was encouraged to experiment with composition and color theory as opposed to traditional image-making.

Mangold attended the High School of Music and Art in upper Manhattan where she continued to study art, however, she did not consider art a viable career, and intended to continue her education at Hunter College where she planned to study nursing.

Mangold’s parents, however, encouraged her to apply to the highly competitive The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and in 1956, she was accepted to the rigorous program.

Because degrees were not awarded at the Cooper Union during this time, Mangold completed her education at Yale, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1961. That same year, she married fellow Yale graduate and minimalist painter Robert Mangold.

Despite the prevailing Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist styles of painting during the 1950s and 1960s, Mangold continued working as a representational painter. She began exploring illusion in the 1960s with a series of photorealistic paintings of wood and linoleum floors which she rendered in varying perspectives and angles.

She further complicated these disorienting illusions with the inclusion of mirrors, exploring the use of reflection and illusion. During the 1970s, Mangold began including painted trompe l’oeil metal rulers and realistically rendered masking tape borders in paint over painted landscapes.

The result was a deceptive, original, and visually jarring exploration of multiple levels of illusory space that highlighted the reality of a painting as an object despite its ability to realistically represent other spaces.

Mangold lives in Washingtonville, New York where she continues to paint. Her most recent works depict abstract representations of trees and rural New York landscape in which she continues to experiment with the inclusion of painted masking tape and other surface elements that draw the viewer back to the reality of the image as a physical object.