Although Pacita Abad was primarily a painter, her love of learning and experimentation with new processes and techniques led her into the world of printmaking in the early 1980s. Abad started printmaking at the Art Institute of Boston in 1980, when she had just returned from a three-month stay in Sudan and Egypt. When Abad moved to the Philippines in 1982, she began to work on silkscreen images with a friend named Boy Gossen. These screen prints initially began with her mask inspired "Self Portrait," which she repeated in several colorful permutations, and then expanded to other mask images where she took the same approach. The mask print here was produced during this period, and features Abad's signature use of embroidery and surface embellishments.