Pat Steir

Pat Steir, born in 1938 in Newark, New Jersey, and died in 2026 in Manhattan, New York, was at the forefront of American painting for several decades. She became known for her “drip”-style paintings, which often represented a challenge to the hegemony of Jackson Pollock. Poet and art critic John Yau wrote that Steir’s work “tends to focus on time passing, its entropic power,” transmitting to the viewer the deep physicality of time. Pat Steir’s Waterfall Paintings were in part created through the effects of gravity on the medium and the exigencies of chance. Each painting was precisely planned and realized according to a set of rules that the artist had predetermined. Steir’s approach was at once contingent on process and prearranged—a duality paralleled in the way her work traversed the boundary between abstraction and representation.

Pat Steir graduated from Pratt Institute in New York City in 1962. She was a recipient of the Guggenheim Artist’s Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant, and she received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from Pratt Institute, as well as being named an Alumni Honoree by both Pratt Institute and Boston University. Steir worked as an editor for Semiotext(e) magazine and was a founding board member of both the Printed Matter bookshop in New York City and the landmark feminist journal Heresies.

Important solo exhibitions included the Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai (2021), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (2020), Barnes Museum, Philadelphia (2019), National Academy Museum, New York (2013), Museo Academia San Carlos, Mexico City (2013), Newcomb Art Gallery, New Orleans (2013), Whitney Museum of American Art (2011), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2010), Reykjavik Art Museum (2007), Texas Gallery, Houston (2005), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (2003), Boise Art Museum (2003), Contemporary Arts Museum, Honolulu (2001), and Madison Art Center (2001).

Significant group exhibitions included the AC Institute, New York (2013), Castello Svevo, Bari (2013), Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg (2012), San Antonio Museum of Art (2011), Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington (2010), Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (2009), Orlando Museum of Art (2007), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (2006), ZKM, Karlsruhe (2006), National Academy, New York (2006), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2004). Her work is included in major public collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., SFMOMA, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Tate, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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