Mark Joshua Epstein: Artist in Residence Presentation

Mark Joshua Epstein received his MFA from the Slade School of Fine Arts (London, UK), and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University (Boston, MA). Mark is the 2025 recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant.

In my current sculptural paintings and works on paper, these entangled shapes are themselves echoes of those that appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish cut paper works. Made with laborious care by both amateur and professional artists, the central texts that they depicted are typically framed by intricate patterned borders, and were displayed in the home as both ornament and talisman. Taking inspiration from these works is a reclamation, one that seeks to revive a domestic history that was nearly erased by the Second World War. In responding to their forms, my practice envisions what might have been if once thriving Jewish communities in Europe had stayed intact.

The Artist-in-Residency is generously funded by the Windgate Foundation.