Deborah Elder Masters, a prolific sculptor and early environmental advocate for North Brooklyn, passed away on Dec. 6 following a prolonged illness. She was 74.
Masters – born Dionysia Kokkinos – helped spearhead an enormously impactful advocacy movement that has produced many of the environmental protections New Yorkers enjoy today.
“Deb was at the forefront of a movement to force the recognition of poor communities, communities of color who were viewed as less politically powerful and were the most impacted by environmental injustice,” said former City Councilmember Ken Fisher, who was introduced to Masters in the early ’90s, when he represented Dumbo and Masters was living in a loft in the neighborhood.
Back then, the environmental movement Masters was helping lead was “in its infancy,” says Fisher, and those in power were hardly concerned about the air quality in the low-income neighborhoods she was campaigning for, despite them being plagued by “an extraordinary collection of environmental insults” including an underground oil spill larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster, a lead belt and radioactive waste.
That New Yorkers successfully organized against such heinous pollutants may sound unremarkable today, but at the time, it was radical.
“There are so many issues in this neighborhood that need mobilizing,” Masters told The New York Times in 1992, at a meeting she’d helped organize to oppose an ill-fated plan to build a garbage incinerator in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
She also successfully helped fight plans to dock a floating power plant in South Williamsburg and stop the lead-paint showers caused by sandblasting-based maintenance of the Williamsburg Bridge. In the process, she assisted in the formation of a local activist coalition.
In 1998, when the Giuliani administration was considering opening trash transfer stations in residential neighborhoods, the burgeoning environmental movement that Masters had helped helm vowed to fight any such plan. “Usually that’s not saying much,” City Limits reported at the time, but “If communities can re-employ the stalling strategy they used to kill the proposed Brooklyn Navy Yard incinerator plan five years ago, they have a good chance to halt this plan.”
Masters was “ a true advocate,” unafraid and able to rally the whole neighborhood, said curator Kathleen Gilrain, a longtime contemporary. “She was this very powerful community member. She didn’t hold office, she wasn’t a politician, but she knew them all, so she was really instrumental.” Masters, she added, loved to teach others her ways so “she didn’t just go in and have to do everything herself.”
In 1995, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection made her a local environmental monitor, a first-of-its-kind role. She was charged with monitoring Greenpoint and Williamsburg, and serving as an intermediary between area residents and representatives.
Masters was also an outspoken advocate for the Loft Law.
The legislation was first passed in 1982 as a form of legal protection for those who’d been living in mostly former industrial spaces, and required landlords to bring such units up to code. Original stipulations did not protect Masters’ Dumbo loft. “It was one of those lofts that you kind of dreamed New York would be full of,” said Masters’ friend Megan Williamson, recalling the space’s soaring ceilings, giant dining room tables, and the parties she’d throw.
But it was the late ‘90s, the area was gentrifying, and the building’s landlord became hellbent on ridding it of its current tenants to make room for higher-paying ones. He began waging a harassment campaign against Masters and her neighbors.
“One memorable afternoon, we got a call that her landlord had hired ex-Mossad agents to cut the power in their building,” recalled Fisher.
Another time, “they took all the fire doors down in the entire building,” Williamson said. Knowing that the FDNY would evict the tenants if they found out, Masters and her neighbors quickly located and rehung the doors.
On other occasions, the landlord would “cut sewer pipes in the building” and “put a hot plate with fish on it and loud music in the loft underneath.”
The tenants eventually settled with the landlord and, in 1998, a number of them used the money to build out rented apartments in an industrial South Williamsburg building at 475 Kent Ave.
Masters took an entire 13,500-square-foot floor.
But there was trouble there, too: 150 residents were evacuated on one brutally cold day in January 2008. The FDNY and the buildings department had found numerous violations with the building, including an illegal basement matzo bakery they were concerned might explode.
Masters not only lobbied for the residents to return to the building, but also advocated for the expansion of Loft Law to protect their residency there in perpetuity. She helped win on both counts.
“ She was kind of bigger than life in a way,” said Simon Lee, who lived at 475 Kent Ave. then and still lives there now.
“It wasn’t like if you had a problem, [Masters] would solve it,” said the artist Eve Sussman, another 475 Kent resident. “It was like, if there was a problem [Masters would say] ‘how dare they, I’m calling this person and that person and that person’ – she was really good at making noise to the right people.”
Despite being 5’3”, “she could be really intimidating.”
Masters, a New York Studio School Graduate, approached her sculptural work with the same passion she brought to her advocacy, and two of her large-scale pieces have become permanent parts of the city’s fabric.
At JFK Terminal Four, her 350-foot series of painted relief sculptures depicting everyday scenes from around the boroughs has greeted those arriving in New York since 2001. To transport them to the airport, they had to be hoisted out of Masters’ loft’s seventh-story window by crane – quite the sight, Sussman recalled.
Masters’ work is also permanently installed in South Brooklyn, where her 1,260-square foot, terracotta-tinted “Coney Island Reliefs” have transformed the side of the Ocean Parkway viaduct – which delineates Brighton Beach and Coney Island – into a portrait of King Neptune and casual beach scenes alike since 2012. Former Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz was so moved by the reliefs that, upon cutting the ribbon on their installation that he proclaimed April 30 to be “Deborah Masters Day” in perpetuity.
“He just declared it and gave her this plaque,” said Geoff Wilcox, Masters’ husband. He met Masters when she was a visiting artist at California’s Chico State. He was her student.
Brooklyn-based pyrotechnic artist Kim Couchot, who became Masters’ longtime assistant, also met her during the Chico State stint.
“When she came, it was f—ing great, because she smoked in the classroom, she brought her dogs to school. I’m just like, this f—ing woman is amazing,” Couchot said. “The reason I actually made it to New York was Deborah.”
To honor Masters, Wilcox has turned her studio in Chatham, New York – where she moved in 2007 – into a gallery displaying a retrospective of her art career and hosting an ongoing exhibition featuring the work of Masters’ friends.
“That’s kind of been the legacy of Deb: Bringing the artist community together,” he said.
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