Pat Steir is an American acclaimed painter and printmaker best known for her wall drawings and signature style of abstract painting.
Background
Pat Steir was born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in 1940 in Newark, New Jersey, the eldest daughter of a Russian-Jewish immigrant family. Her father would have also aspired to be an artist, instead worked in several art-related businesses, including silk-screening, window displays, and neon sign design. Steir recalls knowing she wanted to be an artist or a poet from the age of five, later giving up a scholarship to study English at Smith College to pursue a degree in art instead. When she was growing up, she often visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Education
Torn between her interest in art and the security of a college scholarship to Smith College to study English, Steir turned to the principal of her high school, who happened to play chamber music at Pratt Institute, for advice. Shortly thereafter, an interview was arranged with the chairman of the department of graphic arts and illustration at the university, whereupon she was accepted, with a scholarship, into the program. Steir attended the Pratt Institute in New York from 1956 to 1958, where she developed a strong interest in graphic design, illustration, printmaking, and typography.
Following her marriage to a high school friend Merle Steir in 1958, she moved to Boston where she briefly attended School of the Museum of Fine Arts, before transferring to Boston University College of Fine Arts where she studied painting and comparative literature from 1958 to 1960. She returned to Pratt and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1962. At Pratt, she was most influenced by her teachers Adolph Gottlieb, Richard Lindner, and Philip Guston.
After graduating, Steir immediately began to show her art publicly, appearing in her first group show at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia in 1962. Her first solo exhibition was at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, just two years later. Around 1962 - 1966, she also worked in New York as an illustrator and a book designer. Then from 1966 to 1969, she worked as an art director at Harper & Row publishing company in New York. She left that position when Diane Arbus quit her job at the Parsons School for Design at Princeton University and asked Steir if she would like to apply for the job.
Steir met Marcia Tucker, who had recently been named Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1969. Tucker introduced her to the women's movement and many fellow artists working in New York. Steir was amazed, shocked, and thrilled to find hundreds of women who felt trapped as she did by the very real limitations of society and government on women.
In the early 1970s, after a dinner with Marcia Tucker and artist Bruce Nauman, she traveled to California to view the latter's retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. An introduction to John Baldessari led to a lecture at the California Institute of the Arts, who put up flyers reading "Somewhat famous artist is here." Steir was invited to teach, and continued at CalArts until 1975; her students included Ross Bleckner, David Salle, and Amy Sillman.
During her stay at Nauman's house in Pasadena, she first met Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, who would become an important influence for the artist. He taught her not to judge a work while he is making it. Around that time, she also met art writer Douglas Crimp, who invited her to join him on a trip to New Mexico to visit Minimalist painter Agnes Martin, whom she had previously met in New York with Bob Fledman, owner of Parasol Press. Steir continued to visit Martin every August for over 30 years until Martin's death in 2004. From Martin, she learned the importance of investing the artist's spirit into the art object.
The early 1970s marked a turning point in Steir's career, beginning with her 1973 solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. The series of rose paintings she began in California, such as "Nothing", earned much critical success leading to continued exhibition opportunities at commercial galleries and university spaces across the United States and abroad. In 1975, she visited Crown Point Press in Oakland with LeWitt before traveling with him to France and Germany, subsequently returning to New York in 1975. Over the next few years, Steir's former experience in publishing proved invaluable, as she collaborated with LeWitt and art critic Lucy Lippard as a founding Board Member of the publication Printed Matter, which was established to publish and promote artists' books, which unlike a typical catalog or art publication, are considered as works of art themselves.
During that period, she was also a founding board member of the feminist journal Heresies, and Semiotext(e), which described its mission as "publishing works of theory, fiction, madness, economics, satire, sexuality, science fiction, activism, and confession." She returned to Crown Point Press in 1977 for the first of numerous collaborations with Kathan Brown, ultimately publishing over 100 prints there including a rare collaboration with the "playful, funny, serious and hardworking" avant-garde artist and composer John Cage.
The introduction to Cage through Kathan Brown in 1980 proved revolutionary to Steir's artistic development. It was Cage's reliance upon chance as an artistic device that opened a new direction for Steir. Stephen Addiss, pupil and colleague of Cage, introduced Steir to Chinese yipin "ink-splashing", a technique developed in the 8th and 9th centuries. However, much of the initial concept was lost when the ideas first related as "thrown-ink painting began in the third century." Steir has won numerous awards for her work. In 1991, Steir received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Pratt Institute, with Alumni honors from both Pratt and Boston Univerisity in 2002.
Achievements
Steir has gained widespread acclaim for her representational and abstract works. Pat Steir is best known for her "Waterfall" series of splashed, dripping pigment on canvas.
Sixteen Waterfalls of Dreams, Memories, and Sentiment
Foss
Who
Summer Moon
Views
The artistic principles of Chinese aesthetics play an important role in Steir's approach to painting. For Steir, who has increasingly questioned image making and thus sought to remove herself from the process of painting throughout her career, succumbing to the natural forces is what she describes as "the spiritual aspect of the work."
Quotations:
"I think of painting as a research. I'm not a product-maker. I'm a researcher."
"Art is the product of the world we live in, it is the culture."
"Art as a political gesture is committed to making something beautiful, and then understanding what beauty is in your own time, because what we think of as beauty changes with time."
"Painting is an object, but it's also a voice. I don't see them as objects; I see them as voices."
"Art is a way you discover the past, and so it brings the past into the present and the future."
"For my work now, I have set up a little system that involves chance. Chance is like a partner, an amusing partner: we'll make something and see what happens."
Membership
In 2016, Steir was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Personality
Steir is a strongly process-driven person.
Quotes from others about the person
She is, in a way, a painter, but she's also an incredible conceptual artist. It's like she allows the paint to do the work."
"I think she's a source of inspiration for a lot of young artists, and for many woman painters. It's that commitment to the visceral process and the paint. She stayed faithful to paint, which is incredibly rare. Very few artists have committed to paint.
Interests
Chinese and Japanese calligraphy and storytelling
Writers
Françoise Cheng
Artists
Jackson Pollock, John Cage, and Agnes Martin
Connections
In 1958 Pat married her high school friend Merle Steir.
