New York Times : Outdoor Sculptures kissed by Nature- June 2007
By Benjamin Genocchio

From where I stand, there is sculpture as far as the eye can see. That's the beauty and power of art in the natural world. It surrounds you, bonding with the landscape. It gives you a way of looking at nature, and art, in a new way.

Hudson Valley Business Journal - Big on Art - June 2007 By Bob Rozycki

Storm King Art Center does sculpture in a big way; even massive. From bigger than life size to awe-inspiring in size, shape, texture and color. While the artwork may be large, the canvas on which they are displayed is even larger - 500 acres of hills, valleys, and woods....

ART MATTERS to Ellenville : Deborah Masters at Storm King- June 2007
By Judy Sigunick

Ever since I saw Deborah Masters and her work at Storm King, last week, I have been designing a personal rescue kit for the day when…. Starting with vitamins, carbon purifiers, pliers, tweezers and knives, sketchbook and a thousand pencils, my laptop complete with photo and word files and a good pair of running shoes, I wrap it all up with Chocolate, darkest chocolate...

Sculpture Magazine - July/August 2003 vol.22 No.6
Reviews: New York - Deborah Masters at Maurice Arlos Fine Art
By Jonathon Goodman

The relation of figurative sculpture to contemporary art is increasingly problematic- not because, as a category of image making, such sculpture is moribund, but because abstraction has pushed representational art to the side, an affront furthered by new artists’ predilection for high-tech imagery that rejects the handmade for digitalization. Figurative art has no place to go primarily because its formal problems and the origins of its creation are deeply related to feeling and craft rather than to intellect and electronic design...

Art in Armerica - February 2003
Deborah Masters at Maurice Arlos and Smack Mellon
By Lilly Wei

Deborah Masters, the Brooklyn-based artist whose monumental 28-panel installation “Walking New York” was commissioned for the new terminal at Kennedy Airport, recently had two simultaneous exhibitions, in Tribeca and Dumbo. The former, at the fledgling Maurice Arlos Gallery, was succinct and arresting. Five bulky, hieratic, larger-than-life figures made in Masters’s signature cubistic style, like Old Kingdom pharaonic statues, sat cross-legged on what resembled wooden skids, their hands in their laps, deep in meditation...

New York Times - September 27, 2002
‘Sacred Matter’ - Karen Dolmanisth and Deborah Masters
By Holland Cotter

Smack Mellon Studios
56 Water Street, Brooklyn
Through Oct. 6
Installation art may have lost some of its cachet of late, but this uncompact medium is well suited to accumulative and performance-based modes of thinking and creating, as is evident in this joint exhibition of two artists at mid-career...

VIE DES ARTS - 2001
DEBORAH MASTERS - An American In New York
By Paquerette Villeneuve

IN NEW YORK, A GIGANTIC FRESQUE IN RELIEF OF 80 METERS IN LENGTH AND 3 METERS IN HEIGHT WILL WELCOME NEWCOMERS TO THE LAND OF AMERICA, UPON THEIR ARRIVAL AT J. F. KENNEDY. THIS MONUMENTAL WORK IS SIGNED BY DEBORAH MASTERS. IT REQUIRED THREE YEARS OF WORK...

The Brooklyn Papers “GO”: January 13, 2003
Thinking Big - Sculptor Deborah Masters Talks about her ‘Angel’ in the Brooklyn Public Library
By Lisa J. Curtis

To call Deborah Masters’ artwork heavy would be a gross understatement. The daughter of a bridge engineer, Masters likes to work on a large scale, with cranes and concrete. The Brooklyn Public Library will host a talk on Jan. 11 by the accomplished Brooklyn sculptor in conjunction with the instillation of her latest work, “Angel in Crown Heights,” at Central Library. Her installation in the Library’s Lobby Gallery is a larger-than-life-sized representation of her assistant Angel Mohammed, surrounded by pencil drawings of the street where he grew up...

Art in America, Deborah Masters at LedisFlam
by Nancy Princenthal

Even from the furthest point of the hall leading to this gallery, the nine massive figures in Deborah Masters’ World View had an uncanny impact. Square-shouldered, flat-footed and deadly serious, they advanced toward the doorway with the slow implacable progress of mortality itself...

Village Voice - January 23, 1990
“Women in Command”
By Arlene Raven

The people of Gozo still tell of a legendary ruler who, baby at her breast, built their great temples in a single day. That these earliest-known temples were called Ggantija (the Giant) makes sense, because on Malta, in 3000 B.C.E., the Goddess Herself was visioned as a colossus. Deborah Masters’ rough and sturdy larger-than-life female figures standing in Gracie Mansion’ front gallery, modeled after herself and her friends, seem to participate in this prehistoric matriarchy and its Earth-bound spirituality...

Art in America - June 2001
Public Art in New JFK Terminal
By Cathy Lebowitz

In May, New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport completed its new International terminal, encompassing five ambitious pubic art works. Privately funded, the projects cost $1.1 million, which includes acquisition and maintenance. Three large-scale, site-specific pieces by contemporary artists greet arriving travelers...

Reviews: The New York Times - The Arts -Thursday, May 24, 2001
Being Met At the Airport By New Art
Big, Bold Installations For a Rebuilt Kennedy Arrivals Terminal
By CELESTINE BOHLEN

At most international airports, arriving passengers are treated as an afterthought. The departures area gets the attention: the soaring ceilings, the giant mobiles, the grandiose information booths. But freshly landed travelers are left to fend for themselves through endless bland corridors, down pokey escalators and into the maw of passport control...

Art in America - ART WORLD - April, 2002

Awards...

Greenline- Revelations- Artist and Activist

Brigitte by Barbara Schaeffer

Philadelphia Inquirer- In Sculptor's Figures, A Mysterious Gravity

NY Times- Dith Pran- Front Page Sunday Times

The New York Times - Friday, October 4, 2002
ART GUIDE
Last Chance

“SACRED MATTER: KAREN DOLMANISTH AND DEBORAH MASTERS.” Smack Mellon Studios, 56 Water Street, Brooklyn (718) 834-8761 (through Sunday). Installation art is well suited to the accumulative and performance-based modes of creation seen in this joint show of two artists at mid-career...

Newsday -City - Thursday April 26, 2001
Missing Cloth’s No Cover-Up
By Pete Bowles

Deborah Masters, whose depiction of a nude, crucified Christ, caused a bried controversy at Kennedy Airport, said yesterday that she has accidentally left off the figure’s loincloth...

CRAIN’S New York Business - Jan. 28-Feb. 4, 2001
The Fine Art of Traveling

Frazzled travelers arriving at JFK International Airport from overseas may soon feel more like they’re visiting the Museum of Modern Art than shuffling through passport control and customs. The anxiously awaited new international terminal, slated to open by midyear, will have one of the largest privately funded art displays in New York City...

Daily News - Wednesday, April 25, 2001
“Artist Adds Loincloth to Jesus in JFK Mural”
By Warren Woodberry Jr.

Artist Deborah Masters said she didn’t intend to spark controversy when she painted a mural with a nude figure of a crucified Christ at Kennedy Airport. Masters, 50, whose work is displayed in Terminal 4, said she forgot to paint a loincloth on the Christ figure, which she had originally intended to do. She got her reminder after an offended worker complained to the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. “When I realized it was missing, I put it on,” Masters said yesterday, after she willingly “dressed” Christ at the League’s request. “It was my original intent.”...

The New York Times, The Metro Section, Wednesday, April 25, 2001
Blushing, Then Brushing, Artist Covers Nude Christ
By SUSAN SAULNY

Several strokes of paint in the form of a loincloth have quieted the latest furor over controversial religious art in New York, this time in a new terminal at Kennedy International Airport. There, in an 8-by-10-foot relief depicting a store selling religious items – part 300-foot-long mixed-media mural of New York street life -- was a 12-inch sculpture of Jesus on the cross. Naked...

DIE ZEIT - 4/6/2002 
Hipster auf Asbest
Nur eins stört den industriellen Charme im Szeneviertel Williamsburg: die Industrie
Thomas Fischermann

Das dritt-hippste Stadtviertel der USA liegt fünf Minuten von Manhattan entfernt am Ufer des East River und heißt Brooklyn-Williamsburg. Das hat kürzlich zumindest das sehr hippe Utne-Magazin beschlossen, und es muss etwas dran sein: Die Wohnungen sind seit ein paar Jahren ähnlich teuer wie die im edlen Greenwich Village...

New York Times - Making ‘Dwell Time’ Fly Just a Little Faster
New $1.4 Billion Terminal at J.F.K. Aims to Ease Waits for Passengers
By Ronald Smothers

In the age of the ocean liner, the Port of New York and Ellis Island were the gateways to and from Europe. But 1959 marked a turning point: more people crossed the Atlantic by air then by boat. This shined the spotlight on Kennedy International Airport, then Idlewild, which was just ending a decade of construction in anticipation of the age of air travel. With its nine new terminals strung like jewels along a circular roadway, it was the quintessence of American modernism and seemed the place where the term “jet set” might have been coined...

The North Brooklyn Community News-GREENLINE- January 6- Feb 27, 2003
Crossing Brooklyn: Angel in Crown Heights
Deborah Masters

Opening January 6, 2003, a new series of works entitled “Crossing Brooklyn” will be exhibited at Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library on Grand Army Plaza. The series, free and open to the public, will present new works by Brooklyn artists whose innovative sculptures reflect enduring aspects of life in the borough...

Punkasspunk.com, phancy.com April 24, 2001

Jesus' groin painted over after complaints

Above the Immigration Hall, Walking New York

Describing the theme of her narrative relief panels mounted on a 300-foot wide space above the immigration booths, sculptor Deborah Masters emphasizes the familiar, as well as the diverse in New York. “I look at New York through a different lens, to show the many aspects that make the city so fantastic,” she said...

Hemispheres - August 2001
Terminal Bliss / New York's JFK
By David Butwin

This 1940s aviation icon is the arrival and departure point for millions of international travelers to and from the United States. As a $10 billion makeover gains momentum, new terminals, stunning art, and tastes of the Big Apple are just the start of impressive improvements...

Interior Design - 9/1/2001
First Class
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designs a new international terminal at JFK.
By Edie Cohen

Once all roads led to Rome. Now they're a one-way street to New York. The city's undisputed status as the world's financial capital has expanded to embrace the arts and architecture, and its Mecca qualities have created ceaseless frissons of activity for the growing numbers of inhabitants and visitors intent on sampling the epicenter's vast range of experiences. Need evidence to substantiate growth?

Los Angeles Times - Sunday, May 20, 2001
“New York’s JFK Airport Opens a New Terminal”

New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport this week will open its second terminal in three years, part of a $10-billion project that a spokesman has called “the largest airport redevelopment program in U.S. aviation history.”...

Brooklyn Bridge - September 1996
“Casts of Thousands”
By Bonnie Schwartz

Sculpture and environmental activist Deborah Masters is passionate about two things: making art for public spaces and working on a monumental scale. No wonder the 45-year-old artist, known for her cast-concrete pieces, lives and works in a 5,500-square-foot-loft on Water Street, in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn. She needs the space...

New York Times - April 1, 1988
LedisFlam
Blue Angel: The Decline of Sexual Stereotypes in Post-Feminist Sculpture
By Michael Brenson

This traveling show sets out to “shatter the stereotype that feminism is in any way monolithic,” in the words of Juli Carson, who organized the show with Howard McCalebb. Its title comes from the film starring Marlene Dietrich, “whose sexual flaunting of man’s mythological woman” is seen by Ms. Carson as a “deconstruction of patriarchal values.”...

New York Times - March 3, 1989
LedisFlam
“Beyond Slickness: Sculptors Get Back to Basics”
By Michael Brenson

In a season when the New York art world may seem to be wrapped in slick surfaces, status, and money, three surprising sculpture shows, in three different boroughs, zero in on a more naked and physical reality. Each show is, in a way, exclusive. All 11 artists in one are black; all six artists in another are women; in the third, the four artists are men. Yet all three shows are involved with big feelings and a search for experience that is shared and elemental...

Village Voice - March 9th, 1993
LedisFlam - ‘Covert Action’
By Elizabeth Hess

Several of the 18 artists in ‘Women at War’ were antiwar activists during the Vietnam era. It was a time when political art shed new polemical heights and on occasion went over the top...

Chico Enterprise Record - August 17, 1990
“Garden of Statues Grows at Chico State”

A garden of statuary grew in a tiny triangle between Kendall Hall, the Laxson Auditorium and Ayers Hall over the summer. Art students, under the direction of New York artist Deborah Masters, spent the spring semester designing and constructing 19 monoliths. For a brief period the statuary, all 8- to 10-feet tall, was the center of controversy...

ARTLETTER- 1991
A Publication of the Art Department of California State University at Chico
“The Monoliths Have Landed”

Nineteen concrete monoliths – each weighing between four and eight thousand pounds – finally have found a home near the west entrance to Ayres Hall after three other locations fell through. Distinguished Visiting Professor Deborah Masters conceived of the project as a way of teaching Graduate Sculpture Students “all that I know about making public sculpture in one semester.” Below, Masters and four participating students discuss the project with Dolores Mitchell...

The Daily News-Wednesday April 25, 2001
Mural Modesty - After complaint, artist adds loincloth to nude figure of Jesus
By Paul Moses

An artist has painting a loincloth over a nude figure of the crucified Jesus in a massive mural at Kennedy Airport after construction workers complained about it, officials said yesterday. The figure’s nudity has prompted a worker at the airport’s new international arrivals facility to contact the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a group that raised an outcry in February over a photograph depicting a nude female Jesus at the Brooklyn Museum of Art...

Newsday Copy- Profile- Sheila McKenna

ARTLETTER 1989-1990 Edition
“Visiting Artists & Scholars” – Deborah Masters
California State University, Chico

Deborah Masters, a figurative sculptor, will be a visiting artist during Spring of 1990. Critic Michael Brenson, writing in the New York Times, April 1, 1988, stated: “Deborah Masters’ sculpture is involved with sexual and social stereotypes...

Style: The Washington Post -Wednesday, September 4, 2002
N.Y.’s Dumbo, A Blank Canvas For Artists
Forget SoHo. Now It’s Dumbo.
Forsaken Warehouse District Is New York’s Latest Art Home
By Blake Gopnik

BROOKLYN
It’s the sound that hits you first. A double-barreled roar, as trains and traffic crash across the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges overhead. Down at street level, where the footings of the two bridges almost meet, the rush of the East River and its shipping fills in any sonic gaps...

Gracie Mansion Gallery - Arts Magazine
“New York in Review”
By Robert Mahoney

Holzner’s urbanity and wit was needed at the Snug Harbor Sculpture Festival. This year’s event (through October 22) turned its back of the only strength of the site- the great old architecture- and scurried off into the bushes. Most of the sculptors could not see the trees for the bushes...

Art in America - LedisFlam
Women at War 1993
By Ruth Bass

This strong, provocative show brought together works by 18 women artists who have dealt with war in different ways. The title seemed to have a dual meaning. Some of the artists, particularly photographers Lee Miller, Margaret Bourke-White, and Susan Meiselas, were on the scene in war-torn areas recording specific incidents and allowing the viewer to provide the commentary. The majority of artists, however, have used their art as protest pieces in a personal war against war...

The New Zealand Hereld, World News - Thursday, April 26, 2001
X-rated Jesus given face-saving Y-fronts

NEW YORK - New Yorkers fell victim to an outbreak of political correctness this week when an artist responsible for a giant mural in a soon-to-be-opened terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport agreed to paint a white loincloth over a previously nude Jesus Christ...

JFK Catalogue Copy

Describing the theme of her narrative relief panels mounted on a 300-foot wide space above the immigration booths, sculptor Deborah Masters emphasizes the familiar, as well as the diverse in New York...

The Brooklyn Phoenix - October 1988
LedisFlam
‘Trails of Showing Sculpture in Park’

On the Lullwater’s northern bank stand two bare pedestals and the third lone survivor of Deborah Masters’ “Three Pond Virgins,” an ambitious series of classical figures inspired by Hadrian’s Villa near Rome...

Chico Enterprise Record - Friday, August 17, 1990
“Three Sisters and a Rose Garden”

Larger-than-life female figures by Deborah Masters (Visiting Professor of Sculpture, Spring and Fall 1990), have been shown at the Whitney Museum, New York. Masters’ travels in Mexico, Greece, and Italy brought her in contact with monumental sculptures that served as inspirations for her art. Below, Masters discusses a figural group she is creating for our campus...

The Orion - January 30, 1991
“Sister, Sister: Masters’ Final Sculpture Project Looks Inward”
By Courtney Rastatter

The three sculptures seem to loom over the Rose Garden, their massive figures casting a protective presence over their new home. Students who have been on campus during intersession may have noticed the forms covered in black plastic, wondering what they were...

The Orion - 1991
“Sculpture’s New Location Solves Controversy”
By Lauren Dodge

The controversy over where to put giant monoliths is over. They are now “permanently” stationed in front of Ayers Hall and, according to Deborah Masters, the instructor whose advanced sculpting class created the monoliths, they should remain there for at least 10 years...

PennState Harrisburg Currents - Fall 1990
“Sculpture Garden Receives an Angel”

It stands seven feet three inches high, an ominous figure. When you get closer it is apparent to see that its concrete arms are gently holding a small child. When you enter the rear, west entrance of the Olmsted Building you may meet the “Angel in Flight.”..

Eureka Standard- Jesse

New Yorker, Nancy Ramsey, Loft Tenants

Brooklyn Magazine
Brooklyn Artists, The Newest Left Bank
Amy Virshup, 1986