AFRICAN MASK (KONGO)
Over the course of Abad’s travels, she and her husband Jack Garrity amassed a large collection of tribal art forms, textiles, jewelry, sculptures, and masks, which adorned every room of Abad’s studio-homes. Abad was known for her oftentimes itinerant lifestyle, meaning that the objects that followed her from place to place were simultaneously traces of other localities, and a distinctive marker of “homeness” for her works. The iconography of the tribal sculptures were incorporated into Abad’s works, most notably in Kongo, which is based on a large standing figure that Abad had sourced during a trip to Kongo. This trapunto also represents the increasing diversity of people in the Washington DC area, where Abad and Garrity shared a home in the 16th Street Heights neighborhood, one of the most demographically diverse neighborhoods in the city.

MASKS SERIES
In her Masks series, Abad used the visual traditions of diverse cultures in order to paint portraits of individuals she encountered during her travels. Layering the encounter with different individuals, localities, and experiences in a form of cultural amalgamation, her series ask complex questions about the mutability of representation and tradition in modernity. Abad produced Masks from the early 80's onward, continuing the series across the many localities in which she took up residence. Of the localities represented, the African and Papau New Guinea-focused Masks works are among the most numerous, with several other individual compositions that speak to fictional, or generalized conditions of the "Mask." The series reflects a transnational array of places, offering a unique model for portraiture more in relation to the idea of "translation" than the appropriative methods adopted by European modernists in their work with non-Western traditions.