Remembering Emilie Altemose Stein

December 13, 1951 – August 9, 2022

Emilie Altemose Stein has passed away unexpectedly, after a short illness. She leaves behind her beloved husband, architect Jeffrey Stein of Wayland MA, her loving stepson Dr. Justin Stein of Millbury MA, and a series of paintings and landscape gardens in the Northeast.

Emilie was initially trained as a painter at PAFA/the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and she became an art historian with a degree in East Asian art history from Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania. Her paintings have been exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum and in Philadelphia. She also studied landscape design at Radcliffe Graduate Seminars and was a law student at both Northeastern and Suffolk universities in Boston. In addition Emilie was an accomplished pianist, a protégé of Juilliard pianist and teacher Antonio Fermin in NYC, and she was a member of the Biodynamic Farming Association.

Emilie’s exceptional career included stints as a reader for blind students at Harvard Divinity School, work in disability law at Boston University, development at Brandeis, designing a series of gardens for private and institutional clients, editing her husband’s writing while contributing to his work and that of the community at Arcosanti, AZ, and helping her late father Robert Altemose Sr. manage the family business begun in 1902 by her great grandfather in Brodheadsville PA.

In accepting the Nobel Prize for literature, author Saul Bellow said, “Only art penetrates the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, a genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we cannot receive.” Emilie’s life was dedicated to making art in the landscape that revealed the reality that Bellow spoke of. She tried to include as many people as possible in the joy of those revelations.

A memorial service to celebrate the life of Emilie Altemose Stein will be held in person and via Zoom on Saturday, October 22, 4PM at Peace Lutheran Church in Wayland MA where her Peace Garden, created nearly 20 years ago, still thrives.

-Jeff Stein