National Academy Museum presents Pat Steir: Blue River an installation of four paintings, on view through, is presented as a contemporary counterpoint to the concurrent exhibition, William Trost Richards: Visions of Land and Sea. Steir has engaged with the subject of water since it first began to appear in her paintings of the early 1970s. By the mid-1980s she had created a series of Wave paintings that relied on a circular gesture of the brush to capture the essence of water in motion. Near the end of that decade Steir adopted a different approach to painting by pouring, flinging, and dripping paint onto the canvas, embracing the inherent fluidity of the medium. By incorporating chance and utilizing gravity in the process, she essentially allowed the paintings to make themselves. The result was a body of work that became Steir’s signature Waterfall paintings. www.nationalacademy.org