Pacita Abad: Woman of the World

By Emily Burkhart

September 26, 2023

Pacita Abad (1946-2004), L.A. Liberty, 1992. Acrylic, cotton yarn, plastic buttons, mirrors, gold thread, painted cloth on stitched and padded canvas, 94 x 58 in. Photo: Max McClure. Image courtesy of Artforum.

I truly believe that, as an artist,

I have a social responsibility

for my painting,

to try to make our world a little better.

-Pacita Abad

The work of Filipina-American artist Pacita Abad (1946-2004) combines a global sensibility with multicultural sensitivity. A political refugee who fled the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos as a college student in 1970, Abad was acutely aware of the plight of marginalized people, immigrants, and indigenous communities around the world. She herself was of Ivatan heritage, one of numerous, diverse ethnicities in the Philippines, a kayumanggi (Tagalog for brown-skinned), a deep caramel woman of color. Together with her husband Jack Garrity, an international development economist for the World Bank, Abad traveled the globe, learning about the art forms of the various peoples and cultures she encountered which she then incorporated into her own work. Indeed, she absorbed a diverse array of influences as she lived on five continents and visited more than 60 countries in her lifetime, including Mexico, Guatemala, India, Turkey, Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan, Cambodia, Laos, Mali, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia.

Abad’s painting is characterized by constant change, experimentation, and development from the 1970s right up until her death in 2004. Though she began her career as an oil painter and social realist, she is best known for the trapuntos she began creating in the 1980s, the large-scale textile paintings on unstretched canvas that she stitched and stuffed by hand to create soft fabric reliefs. She would often intricately embellish these surfaces with pieces of lace, ribbons, buttons, patterned cloth, sequins, beads, cowrie shells, and other objects producing fantastically colored and textured compositions.

Pacita Abad posing with her 1996 trapunto painting, Day and Night. Image courtesy of the Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions.

Early Life in the Philippines

Pacita Abad was born on October 5, 1946, in Basco, Batanes, a remote island in the South China Sea and the northernmost province of the Philippine archipelago. She was the fifth of thirteen children born to her parents Aurora Barsana Abad and Jorge Abad. Her father and other family members were involved in the Philippine resistance against the Japanese occupation of Batanes during World War II until the island’s liberation in 1945. After the Philippines attained formal independence from the United States on July 4, 1946, her father was elected as the congressman from Batanes. The family moved to Manila, the nation’s capital, from their home in Basco at the end of his first term. She attended elementary through high school in Manila, returning to Batanes every two years for her father’s re-election campaigns. In 1962, when Jorge was appointed Minister of Public Works and Communications by then President Diosdado Macapagal (1910-1997), her mother, Aurora, temporarily became the congresswoman representing Batanes and later governor of the province.

Education and Political Unrest in Manila

Abad entered the University of the Philippines (U.P.) in 1964 with plans to become a lawyer and go into politics and a life of public service. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science in 1968 and began graduate studies in law at U.P. in 1969 while working on her father’s congressional re-election campaign. Unfortunately, Jorge became the victim of election fraud perpetrated by the corrupt President Ferdinand Marcos (1917-1989). After organizing student demonstrations in Manila protesting the fraudulent elections in Batanes, and opposing the Marcos regime, Abad’s family was targeted and their home in Manila was sprayed with bullets. Concerned about increasing political violence and their daughter’s personal safety, Abad’s parents urged her to leave Manila and finish her law degree in Madrid, Spain.

Arrival in San Francisco

On her way to Spain in 1970, Abad stopped in San Francisco to visit an aunt who exposed her to the city’s vibrant counterculture. Abad then changed course and decided to remain in the United States for a time. While waiting to continue her law degree, she enrolled at Lone Mountain College, now part of the University of San Francisco, in 1971 where she studied Asian History, writing her dissertation on “Emilio Aguinaldo and the 1898 American Colonization of the Philippines,” and earning a Master’s Degree in 1972. At the same time, she became involved in Asian American political and cultural activities in the Bay Area and met her first husband, the painter George Kleiman (b. 1946) who introduced her to painting and the San Francisco art scene. Though they divorced only two years afterward, Abad met artists, musicians, and other freethinkers through Kleiman while living in an artist studio in the midst of Haight-Ashbury, the countercultural center of San Francisco, that influenced her later decision to pursue art.

Jack Garrity pictured on his LinkedIn page. Image courtesy of Heavy.

Meeting Jack Garrity and International Travels

In 1973, after finishing her Asian History degree, Abad was offered a full scholarship to attend Boalt Law School at the University of California, Berkeley. That same year, while attending a regional World Affairs Conference in Monterrey, California, she met her future second husband Jack Garrity, a Stanford University graduate student from Boston, who would support her artistic career over their 31-year marriage. Deciding to defer law school for a year, she traveled across Asia with Garrity, hitchhiking overland from Turkey to the Philippines, passing through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Taiwan and Hong Kong. In 1974, Abad returned home to the Philippines four years after leaving and decided to explore her native country. For two months she and Garrity traveled by bus and boat throughout the Philippine islands. These experiences fostered a lifelong admiration of traditional textiles, which Abad collected, wore, and incorporated into her artwork over the course of her life.

Transition to Art and Early Works

Upon her return to California in 1975, Abad decided to forgo law school altogether and to study painting. She enrolled at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. later that year, where she concentrated on still life and figurative drawing. Her early paintings were primarily socio-political works of people and primitive masks. Social Realist oil paintings based on her global travels include Turkana Women (1979), Water of Life (1980) and Breastfeeding Mother (1981).

Turkana Women (1979)

Pacita Abad (1946-2004), Turkana Women, 1979. Oil on canvas, 49 x 35 in. Image Courtesy of Pacita Abad.com.

One of Abad’s earliest paintings, Turkana Women (1979) portrays two women belonging to the pastoral Turkana tribe of South Sudan wearing traditional beaded neck cuffs as a herd of horses grazes in the background. The dark-skinned, bare-breasted women stand with hands on hips, appearing to be in conversation with each other.

Water of Life (1980)

Pacita Abad (1946-2004), Water of Life, 1980. Oil on canvas, 35 x 50 in. Image courtesy of Pacita Abad.com.

Another early work, Water of Life (1980), depicts a somber scene in Cambodia. A Kampuchean woman with three children is pictured in front of a makeshift shelter at a UN refugee camp for survivors of the Cambodian Civil War (1967-1975) and genocide (1975-1979). The mother supports the head of her youngest son as he drinks from a bowl while the other two wait. Speaking about Water of Life, Abad commented:

As the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] water trucks

approach the camp, the Kampuchean children rush to fill their plastic pails with

water. I was particularly touched, when at the corner, I saw this woman giving her

son a drink from a bowl of water, while her other two sons anxiously waited their

turn.

In addition to its more urgent theme, Water of Life shows more technical skill and a more sophisticated handling of color than Turkana Women (1979).

Breast-Feeding Mother (1981)

Pacita Abad (1946-2004), Breast-Feeding Mother, 1981. Oil on canvas, 36 x 32 in. Image courtesy of Pacita Abad.com.

Breast-feeding Mother (1981) portrays a natural, intimate moment between a mother and child. A woman is seated in a black wicker chair nursing a baby against a mottled green background. According to Abad, the woman is a single mother from the Dominican Republic, where “divorce is not practiced and birth control is not a common practice” so “many mothers are left by their men without financial and child support.” With her hair in colorful curlers and wearing dangling earrings, the woman appears as though she were interrupted by the baby while dressing. She gazes into the distance, her bra half removed as the infant nurses at her uncovered breast.

Photo of Pacita Abad with one of the paintings from her trapunto Masks and Spirits series, n.d. Image courtesy of the Walker Art Center and Colossal.

Trapunto Paintings

Around 1980, Abad invented her signature hand-stitched trapunto painting style while living in Boston and painting with the artists Maria Fang, Barbara Newman, and Joana Kao. Adapting techniques from Newman’s puppet-making, Abad developed a trapunto painting style, after an Italian technique of stitching and stuffing fabric to give a three-dimensional sculptural effect to textiles. Trapunto comes from the Italian word “to quilt.” It is a method of quilting that is also called “stuffed technique.” Abad employed the method on canvas.

Trapunto exhibition view at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, Philippines, 2018. Image courtesy of Walker Art Center and Colossal.

African Mephisto (1981)

In 1981, Abad created her earliest known trapunto work named African Mephisto, which inaugurated her “Masks and Spirits” series (1981-2001), a group of works focusing on Indigenous masking traditions. Made following two stays in Sudan in 1979 and 1980, African Mephisto is based on a portrait of a Dinka man Abad painted while there. Decorative markings and symbols cover a pinched, ghostly white painted face. The mantle the figure wears consists of semicircular bands of brightly colored and patterned cloth, some of which Abad acquired in Sudan, others she painted inspired by woven baskets she saw in Omdurman [a city in Sudan] that constitute the cape he wears. The work’s title, African Mephisto, refers in part to István Szabó’s award-winning 1981 film, Mephisto, about an actor in Nazi Germany who sells his soul to the regime in return for success and acclaim.

Pacita Abad (1946-2004), African Mephisto, 1981. Acrylic, rickrack ribbons, tie-dyed cloth, and painted cloth on stitched and padded canvas, 106 x 71 in. Image courtesy of Artforum.

Marcos and His Cronies (1985)

Another key work from Abad’s Masks and Spirits series is 1985’s Marcos and His Cronies, an over sixteen-foot-tall trapunto that parodies the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. It is one of Abad’s rare explicitly political works. Originally called The Medicine Man, the tapestry-like painting was inspired by a wooden Sinhalese Sanni exorcism mask Abad saw in Sri Lanka when traveling on the back roads down the mountains from Kandy to Galle in 1984. She noticed the mask hanging outside the home of a traditional medicine man in a rural area of the country and created the monumental work after her return to Manila while Ferdinand Marcos was still president of the Philippines. Abad did not officially change the name of this trapunto to “Marcos and His Cronies” until after she left the country in January 1986, just before Marcos was deposed.

Against a patchwork background encrusted with tiny colored buttons signifying the multitudes of people he oppressed, the central figure of Marcos appears as a reptilian, disease-ridden red and green demon surrounded by writhing ringed snakes and beaded cobras with tiny figures representing the many people he destroyed dangling from between his teeth and clenched in his fists. He is flanked by eighteen of his political cronies, most denoted by smaller masks adorned with gleaming fangs. Marcos stands atop the clownish head of his wife Imelda, whose toothy grin Abad studded with rhinestones in homage to her penchant for extravagance and ostentation.

Pacita Abad (1946-2004), Marcos and His Cronies, 1985. Acrylic, oil, textile collage, mirrors, shells, buttons, glass beads, gold thread and padded cloth on stitched and padded cloth, 197 x 115 in. Singapore Art Museum, Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore. Image courtesy of Artsy.

Masks from Six Continents (1990-1992)

Pacita Abad (1946-2004), Masks from Six Continents, 1990-1992. Washington, DC Metro Center. Image courtesy of Tate Gallery, London.

In 1990, Abad was awarded a major commission to show her work at the Metro Center in Washington, DC for a three-year installation. She exhibited six monumental trapunto paintings she called Masks from Six Continents as each work represented a different continent. The installation included a version of Abad’s European Mask (1990), which is in the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery in London.

Pacita Abad (1946-2004), European Mask, 1990. Acrylic paint, silkscreen and thread on canvas, 187 x 252 in. Image courtesy of Tate Gallery, London.

The titles of the masks reference the cultures that inspired their shapes, patterns and techniques from Abad’s globe-trotting journeys. Africa is Kongo Mask, North America is Hopi Mask, and South America is Mayan Mask. Of the six masks, European Mask is the only one that is generically titled with the continent's name. According to Abad, each mask reflected “all the different people I see on the train.”

L.A. Liberty (1992)

Pacita Abad (1946-2004), L.A. Liberty, 1992. Acrylic, cotton yarn, plastic buttons, mirrors, gold thread, painted cloth on stitched and padded canvas, 94 x 58 in. Photo: Max McClure. Courtesy Pacita Abad Estate. Image courtesy of Artforum.

L.A. Liberty (1992) from Abad’s series entitled Immigrant Experience (1990-1995) resulted from a visit to New York’s Ellis Island where she saw that the narrative of immigration being mythologized largely celebrates the experience of white Europeans arriving in the the first half of the twentieth century, excluding later immigrants of color like herself. Countering this historical erasure, Abad recast Lady Liberty as “an international woman of color,” a phrase coined by artist Faith Ringgold in a 2003 essay describing the piece. Liberty’s facial features are based on those of a friend of Abad’s. Like Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s original Neoclassical statue, she wears a Grecian robe, spiked crown, and holds a torch and tablet in her hands. However, the robe, torch, and tablet of L.A. Liberty are vividly patterned. Coupled with her mahogany complexion, dark hair and bangs, and the red and yellow earring observed hanging from one ear, this Liberty speaks of different traditions. Echoing the rays on her crown, rays of intense color radiate behind her like refracted sunlight, picking up the colors of her robe. Some scholars have suggested that the “L.A.” in the title might stand for “Latin America,” symbolizing the thousands of Asian and Latin American immigrants who have entered the United States through its Western and Southern borders and not Ellis Island. Abad herself became a U.S. citizen in 1994 having first arrived to visit in the U.S. in 1970 through San Francisco.

Final Work and Death

Ten years later, in 2004, at the age of 58, Abad’s life was tragically cut short following a long battle with lung cancer. Nethertheless, Abad’s rich artistic legacy spanned thirty-two years. She creat[ed] more than 4,500 artworks as well as public art installations and paint[ed] the Alkaff Bridge, (built in 1997), a 55-meter steel bridge in Singapore with 2,350 circles. This colorful pedestrian bridge symbolizing the friendship between Singapore and the Philippines was completed just months before her death.

Pacita Abad (1946-2004), Alkaff Bridge at Robertson Quay, Singapore. Photo by Hanidah Amin. Image courtesy of Channel News Asia.

Ribbon cutting at the launch of the newly repainted Alkaff Bridge at Robertson Quay on July 12, 2019. Image courtesy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Singapore.

Legacy and Google Doodle

In her lifetime, Abad was the subject of over 40 solo exhibitions at museums and galleries in the U.S., Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America and participated in more than 50 group and traveling exhibitions. In 2020, her memory was honored with a Google Doodle, and from April 15–September 3, 2023, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis mounted the first comprehensive retrospective of Abad’s work to date featuring over 100 works, many never before displayed in the U.S. Entitled simply Pacita Abad, it was organized by the Walker in collaboration with the Pacita Abad Art Estate and curated by Victoria Sung. Her work is in public, private, and corporate art collections in over 70 countries. Interest in this artist, a petite, once overlooked woman of color, deservedly grows as both the Dallas Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently acquired major works.

2020 Google Doodle honoring Pacita Abad. Image courtesy of ARTnews.

For more information on Pacita Abad and her art, visit pacitaabad.com.