Jameel Arts Centre: Pacita Abad: I Thought The Streets Were Paved With Gold

Known for her large scale, colorful ‘trapunto’ works, Pacita Abad (1946-2004) was a Philippine-American artist whose prolific oeuvre spanned continents and ranged from abstract forms to social realist depictions of everyday life in the U.S.A, the Philippines and elsewhere.

Having lived and travelled widely across Asia and many parts of the world, Abad’s work is an amalgamation of techniques and subject matter drawn from her lived experiences and mostly worked in her signature trapunto technique of padding and stitching canvas before painting and layering it with textiles, printed objects and other materials such as jewelry, buttons, and shells.

Pacita studied painting at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Arts Student League in New York. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Spike Island, Bristol; Silverlens, Manilla; The Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; National Museum, Jakarta; Hong Kong Arts Centre; Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila; Bhirasri Museum of Modern Art, Bangkok; The National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; and the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Boston, among others. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including: 13 th Gwagju Biennale, Gwangju; Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, a travelling exhibition organised by the Asia Society, New York (1996); Beyond the Border: Art by Recent Immigrants, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (1994); La Segunda Bienal de la Habana (1986); and the 2nd Asian Art Show, Fukuoka Art Museum (1985). Her work can be found in the collections of Tate Modern, London; M+ Museum, Hong Kong and the National Gallery of Singapore. She died in Singapore in 2004.

This exhibition brings together a selection of her ‘trapunto’ paintings and is curated in collaboration with the Pacita Abad Art Estate and London-based artist Pio Abad.