Pacita Abad

"Traveling for me is my art school."

–– Pacita Abad, 1991

Pacita Abad was a Filipino-born artist who drew on her many relocations across the globe to create richly colored and patterned mixed-media works and paintings that often address themes of migration, hybridity, and cross-cultural connection.Pacita Abad was a Filipino-born artist who drew on her many relocations across the globe to create richly colored and patterned mixed-media works and paintings that often address themes of migration, hybridity, and cross-cultural connection.

Born to politically active parents, as a young adult Abad pursued political science at the University of the Philippines (1968) and shortly thereafter became involved in organizing against the regime of Ferdinand Marcos (1965–86). In 1970, Abad visited San Francisco on her way to pursue a law degree in Madrid and was so taken by the American city's progressivism that she decided to remain in California. In 1973, she received an MA in history at Lone Mountain College (now part of the University of San Francisco) and met Jack Garrity, a development economist, whom she later married. The pair took a yearlong trip from Turkey to the Philippines, mainly hitchhiking, that sparked Abad's lifelong interest in cross-cultural connection and learning from local artistic communities.

In 1976, Abad moved to Washington, DC, and studied at the Corcoran School of Art, presenting her first exhibition of paintings at her home and studio in 1977. In the following years, she and Garrity lived in and explored an astonishing number of countries across six continents. Her itinerant lifestyle shaped Abad's artistic practice, making her work a reflection of the diverse peoples and communities with whom she engaged as well as of her own experiences of migration and diaspora.

In the early 1980s, Abad began her signature “trapunto” paintings, elaborately embroidered and painted quilted canvases. The medium's portability suited her frequent moves while the works reflected firsthand observation of Indigenous techniques and materials, from Indonesian batik to Indian mirror embroidery. In 1981, Abad began a longstanding engagement with mask traditions and their intricate play with identity, as in her woodcut Watusi: I'm Lost without You (1991, SAAM) and Masks from Six Continents (1990–93), a public commission for the Metro Center station in Washington, DC.

In the 1990s, Abad turned her attention directly to the hopes, opportunities, and hardships of border-crossing in her series Immigrant Experience. During a visit to Ellis Island, she was struck by the emphasis on European experiences of immigration to the United States and subsequently made trapuntos centering "the American immigration experience of people of color." Abad's New Kids in Class (1994, SAAM) reflects her fascination with the dynamic interactions among students of different nationalities and cultures that she encountered while teaching in DC public schools.

Throughout her life, interwoven with Abad's careful attention to local communities was her sense that "art should play an important role in our everyday lives, and not just be a picture that hangs on the wall of the galleries and museums." This belief led her to paint the Alkaff Bridge over the Singapore River with more than two thousand circles in fifty-five different colors in 2004 as a "gift to Singapore," where she resided during her final years.

Authored by Katherine Markoski, American Women's History Initiative Writer and Editor, 2024.