Pat Steir

Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker. The artist was born in Newark, New Jersey. She attended both Pratt Institute and Boston University College of Fine Arts, receiving her BA from Pratt in 1962. After she graduated from art school, Steir had her work featured in group shows at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She rose to prominence in the 1970s when she began to create monochromatic canvases that had Xs through them, as seen in the Lannan Collection. Since then, her style has branched to include many other transformative forms of Abstract painting. She explained, “I wanted to destroy images as symbols. To make the image a symbol for a symbol. I had to act it out—make the image and cross it out. …no imagery, but at the same time endless imagery. Every nuance of paint texture worked as an image.”
Steir has had retrospectives and exhibitions all over the world, including the Tate Gallery in London, as well as two shows at the Brooklyn Museum and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York that traveled throughout Europe. In 2008, Steir received the Pratt Institute Alumni Achievement Award. She has been an art instructor at Parsons School of Design and Princeton University, as well as the Art Director at Harper & Row Publishing in New York. The artist lives and works in New York and Amsterdam.