Pat Steir 1975: An Interview

Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker, whose work has resisted artworld currents and factions for decades while expanding its reach and maintaining enthusiastic critical support. She graduated from Pratt in 1962 and in 1964 was included in the show Drawing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and had her first solo exhibition at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York. Since then she has had numerous exhibitions for her paintings, drawings and prints, including one-person painting exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum in 1984 and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1987; both exhibitions traveled to museums in Europe and the US. She first came to prominence in the 1970s, when her work concentrated on signs and symbols and was close to Minimal and Conceptual art, though it was more representational and didn't quite fit into either category. Her early and very poetic work was based on an iconography that included isolated brushstrokes, color charts, words, and crossed-out images. In a 1984 conceptual reconstruction, The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style), Steir allowed the history of styles to speak through a single Brueghel painting. Since 1987, abstract waterfall imagery in her paintings has continued her simultaneous engagement with the real and the metaphysical, grounding intellectual investigation in sensuous experience. Steir was a founding board member of Printed Matter bookshop and Heresies magazine, and was on the editorial board of Semiotext magazine from 1975 to 1978.

Steir recounts the development of her artistic vision and ambition in an unguarded interview that inquires deeply into her background and responses to the world in her youth. Steir’s early childhood fantasies and games suggest the strong, interrelated evocations that words and figures continue to possess for her. The artist describes her long period of placelessness and resistance at Pratt and throughout her education, rejecting the formalities of Bauhaus and the angry male energy of Abstract Expressionism long before she felt the surprise and rightness of her own mature work. The split in her art making at that time, between public and private expressions, summarizes the pressures as well as the guiding intuitions that informed Pat Steir’s creative process. This leads to the great significance of standing before her first completely unfamiliar painting, Bird; and finding a place in the art world and the women’s movement in New York. Pat Steir continues to resist easy discourses, and shares her perceptions and conceptions of her practice, from the images she uses to the paradoxical sort of intelligibility specific to art.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1975. Re-edited in 2009.