Pat Steir, born Iris Patricia Sukoneck on April 10, 1938, in Newark, New Jersey, to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, knew from age five that she wanted to be an artist or poet. The eldest daughter of a father who worked in art-adjacent trades like silk-screening and neon sign design, she frequented the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a child. Steir studied at Pratt Institute from 1956 to 1958, then transferred to Boston University's College of Fine Arts for painting and comparative literature from 1958 to 1960, returning to Pratt to earn her BFA in 1962. There, she worked under influential teachers Richard Lindner, who urged her to draw from life and dreams, and Philip Guston.

Her early career blended illustration and fine art; after marrying high school sweetheart Merle Steir (later divorced) and briefly working as art director at Harper & Row, she held her first solo exhibition at Terry Dintenfass Gallery in 1964. Initially associated with conceptual art and minimalism, Steir befriended Sol LeWitt, who taught her to create without judgment, and explored monochromatic canvases like *Nothing* (1974), where a rose is X-ed out to probe image destruction. Friendships with Agnes Martin, whom she visited annually for over 30 years, and John Cage introduced chance operations, shifting her toward process art.

Steir's breakthrough came in the late 1980s with her iconic "Waterfall" paintings, such as *Dragon Tooth Waterfall* (1990), where she poured, dripped, splashed, and flung thick paint from ladders or lifts, allowing gravity to streak luminous cascades down vast canvases. Inspired by 8th-9th century Chinese Yipin ink-splashing painters, Daoism, and Eastern philosophy, these works evoke natural forces through color, atmosphere, and accident—thick blues, silvers, and reds blooming into ethereal flows. Other landmarks include the *Bruegel Series (A Vanitas of Style)* (1982–84), a grid mimicking historical styles, and site-specific installations like *The Nearly Endless Line* (2010).

A trailblazer for women painters, Steir co-founded Printed Matter and the feminist journal *Heresies*, taught at Parsons, Princeton, and Hunter College, and earned a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982) among many honors. Her prints number over 100, and her works grace collections like the Met, MoMA, and Whitney. Married to publisher Joost Elffers until her death on March 25, 2026, in New York City at 87, Steir's legacy endures in her embrace of chance as collaborator, proving painting's vitality beyond control.