In her Bacongo mask series (1983-90), Pacita drew from various visual traditions she encountered during her travels to create images of multiplicity and cultural pluralism. Her masks serve as a kind of cultural amalgamation, asking complex questions about the mutability of representation and challenging the defined categories of race, gender, and class. Pacita produced Masks from the early 1980's onward, continuing the series across the many localities in which she took up residence. Of the cultures represented, the central African-focused Bacongo works have received the greatest acclaim. The series reflects Pacita's insistence on a multidimensional concept of self, offering a unique model for portraiture that challenges appropriative or deductive methods adopted by European modernists in their representation of non-Western traditions.