Pat Steir, Whose ‘Waterfall’ Paintings Redefined Abstraction, Has Died
Pat Steir, the New York-based painter and printmaker known for her “Waterfall” paintings, died at age 87 of natural causes in Manhattan on March 25, 2026, according to her husband Joost Elffers and her niece Lily Sukoneck-Cohen. Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1938, she studied at Pratt Institute beginning in 1956 and finished her BFA in 1962, with early group-show appearances at institutions including MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the High Museum of Art. Steir worked as an illustrator for Doubleday and Harper & Row, later taught at Parsons and the California Institute of the Arts, and returned to New York in 1975 after traveling to Paris with Sol LeWitt. She helped co-found Printed Matter in 1976, joined the feminist journal Heresies in 1977, and worked with Crown Point Press beginning in 1977.
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This story was covered in Museums for Sale, War Shadows the Art World