Deborah Epstein
Deborah Epstein splits her time between printmaking, weaving, and architecture, allowing the disciplines to feed each other through aesthetics, process, and technical issues. Her interests have always been multi-disciplinary, with a special interest in finding the art in everyday life. Prints, woven work, and architectural designs are equally chicken and egg, each one influencing and becoming the next.
In architecture and weaving, her work straddles the structured and the random, exploring freedom within a ruled system, inserting fluidity into a rigid frame. She observes nature to understand its underlying geometries–both structures and anomalies; these observations inform the character of her work. Her most recent prints grapple with difficult but common social subject matter, capturing disturbing realities with subtlety and beauty.
In 2002, she founded Epstein Joslin Architects with her husband, Alan Joslin.
While the projects grew and became more focused on Performing Arts, Epstein continued to work at the human scale–the tactile, the carefully detailed, creating interiors and palettes that define the character and spirit of a space, using colors, textures, and materials to create a palette based in common experience. With this process, Epstein makes a cohesive, coherent statement native to each project, without a signature style, drawing out the specialness of each client and site.
As an architect, she missed the tactile aspect of “maker” that is lost in the architect’s role as “designer”. She began weaving, and restarted printmaking, which informed her most gratifying role at EJA: designing each project’s architectural “artwork”: stage screens and surrounds for concert halls, marquees for theaters, the pieces that make each building uniquely of its place and community: tactile signature pieces–wood, stone, steel, fabric, color: Epstein sees the world from 5 feet, not 30,000.
Epstein’s belief that architecture, as an armature for human activity, has the power to encourage community, collaboration, socio-economic, racial, and gender inclusion and integration, informs her work. In particular, her performing arts buildings foster positive communal experiences and support dialogue. The Shalin Liu Performance Center, has reshaped the town of Rockport, MA, bringing educational opportunities to Cape Ann public school children through artist residencies, music lessons, performance opportunities, and free concerts. As the building has become a destination, it has spurred general economic growth. At a meeting of the Rockport Music Council, many Council and Board members attributed the success of Rockport Music to the building. Similarly, at The Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, in La Jolla, CA, the welcoming outdoor lobby functions as a community living room. Pop-up performances in the courtyard and rehearsals in an adjacent performance space, with its three pairs of large doors opening to the courtyard, include all. The Groton Hill Music Center, whose mission is “to share the transformative power of music, through teaching and performing, and giving music generously when there is need” does the same for Central Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire.
These public spaces are built for the long haul, to give life to communities for decades through performance, music, art, supporting connections to one another and to inspire collective experience at the intersection of human creativity and natural beauty.
In 2023 Joslin and Epstein became Principals Emeriti in Epstein Joslin + Picardy Architects through the ownership transition of their firm.
Prior to Epstein Joslin Architects, for 15 years she was owner and principal of Deborah Epstein Architect, where she produced finely crafted, high-end, custom residential design work. Epstein began her architectural career at Leers Weinzapfel Associates, when LWA numbered fewer than 10 people, more than half of them women.
Epstein earned a Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with associated study at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. As an M.Arch student at MIT, her thesis explored the relationship between architectural design and poetry. The Albert Hinckley Traveling Fellowship allowed her to travel to Glasgow to study the work of Charles Rennie MacIntosh and to Vienna to study the Vienna Secession. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College, Columbia University with associated study at the Lester Polokov Studio and Forum of Stage Design where she studied costume design with Broadway designers. Epstein attended University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Rochester Institute of Technology, where she worked in printmaking and exhibit/industrial design. She has studied textiles at RISD and printmaking at the Shepherd & Maudsleigh Studio, where she is a member.
Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, publications, gallery and museum shows.
Her prints and textiles are represented by Mercury Gallery, Rockport, MA where she has had several solo, duo, and group shows.