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Living in New York, Steir has been exhibiting her paintings worldwide since the 1970s. Her early work was influenced by visual signs and symbols, and was then sometimes described as Minimal or Conceptual art. She developed an iconography that included isolated brushstrokes, mark-making, color charts, words, and images sometimes crossed out. Her work, like a chant, evokes stillness.
For the past ten years the stillness has become denser, and she has made her marks by flinging, pouring, and dripping paint. Currently, images of waterfalls dominate her work as a natural result of this approach.
Steir has also worked with the image of the night sky in her painting. The work has been described as having a Daoist view of nature: a poetic picturing of mankind's relationship to the elemental qualities of earth, air, fire and water.
Steir has said that she makes her work with the attitude of a gymnast, “first the meditation, then the leap.” In her art, she has given up chasing the self in favor of something larger.