Artist-in-Residence

Pat Steir

Pat Steir, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Calligraphy Screen (cherry tree imagery), 1983. Black pigment on unbleached cotton muslin, stretched and inserted in a traditional Shoji frame of ashwood, 80 x 191 x 2 inches. Related edition on natural Belgian linen. Collection of The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Photo credit: Carlos Avendaño.

One of the great abstract artists of our time, Pat Steir took up an inventive approach to painting in the 1980s: her work evolved from painting with brushes to movement-based work that harness gravity to create wholly unique compositions. Her movements, gestures, and direction became as much a part of her work as the paint itself.

Steir came to the Fabric Workshop in 1983, during a period of transition for her practice. Calligraphy Screen (cherry tree imagery), an edition of three free-standing folding screens, contains traces of both Steir’s early love of gestural painting with the drip technique for which she would achieve widespread acclaim. Her loose painterly branches of a blossoming cherry tree stretch across three panels. Though its rhythmic brush strokes and drips carry the speedy appearance of an ink painting, the work was actually created through the silkscreen process. Hand-screenprinted on muslin, each perspective is suspended within an ash frame and hinged together in a manner of a traditional Japanese Shoji screen.

Studio Team

Pat Steir, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia.
Project Manager: Robert Smith, assisted by Michele Bregande and Meredith Kurtzman; wooden screens constructed by Marc Neagle.

Art

From the Archive

A black and white picture of a woman working with a large piece of fabric with rhythmic ink drawings printed on it. She is working in an artist studio that has tall frames in the background.

Shop

An image of a book cover featuring a colorful pattern by artist Kim MacConnel. The colors that stand out in the design are yellow, green, red, and gold.

An Industrious Art: Innovation in Pattern & Print at The Fabric Workshop

An image of a thin, rectangular book, more tall than it is wide. The cover of the book depicts a variety of colorful fabrics in various patterns.

A Decade Of Pattern: Prints, Patterns and Prototype

Artist Bio

American, born 1938, Newark, NJ. Lives and works in New York, NY.

Pat Steir is best known for her “waterfall” paintings characterized by drip, pour, and splash techniques. Her work challenges the boundaries of craft, removing herself from the process and allowing gravity to direct the paint. Steir attended the Pratt Institute in New York from 1956–58 and returned to receive her BFA in 1962 after a brief stint at the Boston University College of Fine Arts. Early group show exhibitions at the High Museum in Atlanta, GA, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY established Steir among the few women artists to gain international attention in the male-dominated art field of the 1960s. Solo exhibitions of Steir’s work have been presented at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, PA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. Pat Steir’s work is represented in institutional collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France; and Tate Gallery, London, UK, among others.