BIOGRAPHY
Widely defined by her use of color, something she remained adamant about from her early studies, Pacita Abad (1946-2004) 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. Accumulating materials, techniques, and subjects from her vast travels, oftentimes within the same composition, 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. Abad is the subject of a major traveling retrospective, opening at the Walker Arts Center in 2023.

IF MY FRIENDS COULD SEE ME NOW
A seminal work of Pacita Abad’s Immigrant Experience series, If My Friends Could See Me Now (1991) offers a contemplative portrait of migration, friendship, and autobiographical experience in a layered, colorful instance of the artist’s celebrated trapunto paintings. The work is set in San Francisco, the Transamerica Pyramid featuring notably in the skyline behind the central figure’s head, above a panel that states “An American Dream.” San Francisco was meant to be a stopover after fleeing the Philippines due to the Marcos regime’s political violence, which threatened her and her family’s lives. Captivated by the Summer of Love, Abad decided to stay in San Francisco, where she eventually met her future husband Jack Garrity, and settled into her path toward becoming an artist.

The central figure, a dark-skinned woman in a beret, is a stand-in for multiple experiences, beyond just Abad’s own. It protrudes slightly from the work, distinctive from the material trappings of the “American Dream” that surround it. This striking, uncertain figure was originally cut from a family portrait of Abad’s friends that she painted in Boston in the early 1980s. A multicultural family, with a Laotian-immigrant father and a Vietnamese-refugee mother, the family was interspersed across several trapuntos—the father and brother included in I Thought the Streets Were Paved with Gold, the daughter in How Mali Lost Her Accent, and the mother, Thanh Lo, in If My Friends Could See Me Now. Reflecting upon her journey as a “boat person,” fleeing Vietnam in the midst of the American-waged war there, Thanh Lo stands conflicted in a country that simultaneously bore partial responsibility for her trauma yet also offered an opportunity toward a stable life. As in Abad’s other Immigrant Experience compositions featuring this family, the artist layers its original portrait-based context with her own experience, as well as a general commentary on the uncertain conditions of immigrant experiences across cultures.

Positioned in an unresolved stance, both proud and perhaps uncertain, the figure and its surroundings are specific, layered with meaning, context, and the relational, vitalistic intimacy that Abad prized in her depictions. The work also speaks to a broader condition in North American immigrant experiences across the 1990s. It remains also a partial tribute to the city of San Francisco, its charm and cultural vibrancy luring Abad away from her expected path. The twisting road leading up to the golden mountain within the composition is perhaps an allusion to the “Golden Mountain” of San Francisco, a common nickname for the city coined by Southern Chinese immigrants during the 1850s that remains in use today.

IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE SERIES
Focusing on immigrants to the global North, with particular emphasis on the US, the Immigrant Experience series takes on Abad's incisive questions about the possibilities of solidarity between "third world" cultures, a poignant early-predecessor to the "South-South" discourse of the contemporary. Drawn out of her personal experience as an immigrant many times over during the course of her transnational life, the Immigrant Experience series anticipates and surpasses the limits of contemporary immigration debates by centering the lived experiences of individuals experiencing immigration, and settling into the uncertain condition we know today as the "diasporic." Making work that highlighted both the joys and injustices of this condition was critical to Abad, having been repeatedly, wrongly detained in multiple Western countries due to her status as a dark-skinned Filipina woman.