Pacita Abad

Born to a family of politicians and activists in Batanes, the furthermost-north island state in the Philippines, Pacita Abad (1946-2004) was sent to the US to finish her graduate studies after political violence initiated by Ferdinand Marcos put her life in danger. Abad settled in San Francisco in 1970, drawn in by the Summer of Love, and met Jack Garrity a few years later, the two embarking upon a yearlong odyssey across Asia in 1973. While this trip and its myriad multicultural interactions convinced Abad to devote herself to art, it also foreshadowed the itinerant, global lifestyle that would characterize her artistic practice.

Widely defined by her use of color, something she remained adamant about from her early studies, Abad pioneered new forms of materiality in her work, illustrated in one instance by her widely celebrated trapunto paintings, a form of quilted painting the artist originated by stitching and stuffing her painted canvases instead of stretching them over a frame. Her oeuvre featured an immense array of subject matter, from tribal masks and social realist tableaus to lush and intricately rendered underwater scenes and abstractions. Accumulating materials, techniques, and subjects from her vast travels, oftentimes within the same composition, Abad was uniquely positioned to explore modernity's uneven development with the greatest care, as a figure born outside of the metropole. Her work predates contemporary discourses around postcolonial feminisms, globalization and transnationalism, offering an intuitive understanding of the mutability and heritability of traditions in the places she lived.

Her work has been featured in major international exhibitions, including the 11th Berlin Biennale; 13th Gwangju Biennale; 4th Kathmandu Triennale; Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, a traveling exhibition organized by the Asia Society, New York; Beyond the Border: Art by Recent Immigrants at the Bronx Museum of the Arts; La Segunda Bienal de la Habana, Cuba; and the Second Contemporary Asian Art Show at the Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan. She has also participated in group shows at Haus der Kunst, Tate Liverpool, Para Site (Hong Kong), and the National Gallery Singapore, among many others.

In 2023, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis organized the first major touring retrospective of Abad’s work, curated by Victoria Sung and spanning her 32-year career. The exhibition traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1 in New York, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto over the next two years. Her work was also included in the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa—further cementing her posthumous emergence as a defining figure of transnational contemporary art.

Pacita Abad’s works are held in over 45 public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, SFMOMA, the Hirshhorn, the Walker Art Center, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Tate Modern, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, M+ in Hong Kong, and the National Gallery Singapore. In 2025, Stanford University acquired the Pacita Abad Archives—one of the most significant archival gifts from an Asian American artist—joining landmark holdings alongside Ruth Asawa and Bernice Bing.

Pacita Abad passed away in Singapore in 2004, leaving behind a legacy as a visionary artist who redefined the global contours of contemporary art with color, activism, and radical empathy.