Photo by Greg Gaskey
Pat Steir was born in 1940 in Newark, New Jersey. She studied art and philosophy at Boston University and received her BFA from the Pratt Institute in 1962. She is a founding board member of Printed Matter Inc., New York, and the feminist journal, Heresies. She was also a board member of Semiotext(e).
Her work has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions and projects including: the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France; Musée d’art Contemporain, Lyon, France; Cabinet des Estampes, Musée d’Art et Histoire, Geneva, Switzerland; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Palais Wilson, Geneva, Switzerland; Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; The Tate Gallery, London; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, among many others.
Steir’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Foundation Cartier, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Louvre, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, California; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among other institutions worldwide.
She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1976) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982). She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY (1991), and received a Distinguished Alumni Award from Boston University (2001).
Steir currently lives and works in New York.