Revolutionary Artist Pat Steir Dies at 87
The iconic painter is best known for her signature technique, which she used to create her monumental “Waterfall” series.
Trailblazing artist Pat Steir died on Wednesday at age 87 in Manhattan, according to her family members. The influential American artist, celebrated for her “Waterfall” canvases that she created by methodically pouring and throwing paint, has been featured in some of the world’s most prestigious museums throughout her illustrious career.
“She emerged out of minimalism and conceptualism, but Pat created a visual language wholly her own—a new kind of abstraction that encompasses poetry and philosophy, in a practice that also involved writing, performance, and mentoring,” Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth, Steir’s primary gallery since 2022, said in a statement. He noted that Steir was painting until her very last days, which he called “a testament to the power of her vision and the fierceness of will that really defines great artists…she has left behind one of the great legacies that will continue to inspire and provoke new conversations.”
Born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in 1938 in Newark, New Jersey, Steir was the eldest daughter of a Russian-Jewish immigrant family. Her father, who aspired to be an artist himself, worked in silk-screening, window displays, and neon sign design. Steir knew she wanted to be an artist or poet from the age of five, later turning down a scholarship to study English at Smith College to pursue art instead. She enrolled at the Pratt Institute in 1956, where she studied under Richard Lindner and Philip Guston, then transferred to Boston University’s College of Fine Arts before returning to Pratt to earn her BFA in 1962.
Her career moved fast. By 1964, her work was exhibited at both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, placing her among the first women artists to gain real traction in New York’s male-dominated art scene. She landed her first solo show that same year at Terry Dintenfass Gallery, reportedly by strutting in with her slides. She then served as Art Director at Harper & Row, and by the early 1970s, she was teaching at Parsons, Princeton, and CalArts, where David Salle, Ross Bleckner, and Amy Sillman were among her students.
As deeply committed to the structures of the art world as to her own practice, Steir cofounded Printed Matter, the New York bookseller dedicated to artists’ publications, alongside Sol LeWitt. She was also a founding member of the Heresies Collective, which produced the feminist journal HERESIES, and served on the editorial board of Semiotext(e).
Friendships with LeWitt, Agnes Martin, and composer John Cage reshaped the way Steir thought about making. Working with Cage at Crown Point Press in the late 1970s, she absorbed his embrace of chance and non-intention. A trip to Japan in the early 1980s—where she encountered Chinese Literati painting, Taoist philosophy, and Southern Song Dynasty pottery and painting—laid the final groundwork for the “Waterfall” paintings that defined her legacy. By the late 1980s, she abandoned the brush, climbing a ladder (and later a cherry picker) to pour oil paint down monumental canvases. “Gravity becomes my collaborator,” Steir remarked on her practice to ARTnews’ Hilarie Sheets in 2012. “It’s chance within limitations…The way the thing works is always in part a surprise.”
At age 80, she erected “Color Wheel,” her largest painting installation ever, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The exhibition featured dozens of large-scale works that transformed the second floor of the museum into an immersive spectrum of color.
That same year, Steir unveiled “Silent Secret Waterfalls” at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia—the first time a painter had been commissioned to create work for the institution since Albert Barnes invited Henri Matisse to paint “The Dance” in the 1930s. The distinction placed her in rare company and cemented a late-career stretch that few artists of any generation matched.
In 2020, Steir was the subject of a documentary titled Pat Steir: Artist, which was filmed largely in her Greenwich Village townhouse. The documentary featured Steir’s methods behind creating the “Waterfall” series and personal reflections, including what it was like to combat ageism and gender inequality as a female artist. “I think to be seen as powerful is more difficult for a woman, even when the opportunity rears its head,” she said.
Over the course of her career, Steir received two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts in 1982, an Honorary Doctorate from Pratt Institute in 1991, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016. Her work resides in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Tate Gallery in London, among many others. She will be honored at Printed Matter’s 50th Anniversary Benefit in April, and a survey exhibition opens at the Parrish Art Museum in May 2027. Steir is survived by her husband, Joost Elffers, and niece, Lily Sukoneck-Cohen.
