Dan Mandelbaum was born in 1994 in Westfield, New Jersey and earned his BFA from Pratt Institute, New York.
Through the creation of ceramic sculptures and tiles that capture a wide array of symbols—from ancient cultural artifacts, celestial bodies, and religious icons to quotidian twenty-first century phenomena, including figures from popular culture, materials found on the street, and everything in between—Mandelbaum establishes a distinctive vocabulary that contends with the passing of time and the unavoidable fact that the meaning we ascribe to such things may, one day, be forgotten. The apparent randomness of his distinctive visual lexicon provides a point of entry for a multitude of interpretations to unfold. Mandelbaum thus enables each viewer to take on the process of decoding his language, enlivening new narratives and histories.