Pat Steir, a painter who spent over six decades expanding the boundaries of abstraction, died on March 25, 2026, in New York City. She was 87. Her death was confirmed by her husband Joost Elffers and her niece Lily Sukoneck-Cohen.
Born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in Newark, New Jersey in 1938, Steir trained at Pratt Institute and Boston University College of Fine Arts, earning her BFA in 1962. She came of age during the height of Abstract Expressionism but carved a practice that was distinctly her own — methodical, process-driven, and deeply rooted in chance.
Artistic practice of Pat Steir
Her early work in the 1970s engaged with conceptual and minimalist traditions while pushing back against the symbolic language of a male-dominated art world. She was a founding board member of the feminist journal Heresies, sat on the editorial board of Semiotext(e), and co-founded Printed Matter, Inc., connecting her studio practice to broader political and institutional concerns.
In 1988, she began the Waterfall series, the body of work for which she is best known. The process was deliberately simple: she would load a brush with thinned oil paint, drag it across the top edge of a large, often black canvas, and allow the paint to run downward on its own. The artist’s hand initiated the work; gravity and the properties of the medium completed it. “Gravity makes the image,” she said. It was a method that raised serious questions about authorship, control, and what it means to make a painting.
Her work is held in major public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She was represented by Vito Schnabel Gallery at the time of her death.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
