The first international retrospective of the late Pacita Abad (1946–2004), curated by Victoria Sung with Matthew Villar Miranda, was as celebratory as it was studious. Navigable by the curators’ bold use of color across four expansive galleries and several smaller enclosed spaces, the eponymous exhibition constructed cohesive narratives from the many thematic and stylistic movements of Abad’s autobiographical coordinates, while simultaneously correcting various omissions from the canon of 20th-century art through an intimate and timely dialogue with Abad’s diasporic, feminist practice.
Born in 1946 in Batanes, the northernmost island province of the Philippines, Abad grew up in a political family as the fifth of 13 siblings. Raised in activist circles—first in her Indigenous Ivatan homeland and then in diasporic communities in Manila—Abad’s leadership within various interethnic, multilingual student unions shaped her practice; a friend once called her a “social scientist artist.” Fleeing dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s reign of political violence to study law in San Francisco in 1970, Abad soon began a peripatetic life: she lived in the United States (where she became a citizen in 1994), Indonesia, Sudan, Bangladesh, and Singapore, as well as spending time in more than 60 countries on six continents, refining her artistic language in relation to the land, the water, people, and the myriad material cultures she interacted with.
In the exhibition, Abad’s wildly prolific, textile-centered career was prefaced with a soft- pink-colored alcove featuring the artist’s earliest drawings and paintings. Presiding over the first gallery, titled “Masks and Spirits” after a major body of the artist’s works, was the triumvirate from one of Abad’s most well-known series, Bacongo (1986–88), which were inspired by 19th- and 20th-century ceremonial masks of the Songye and Luba peoples, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. These large-scale, banner-like works share a graphic silk- screened base of parallel and zigzagging lines between and around large radiating eye sockets and spiraling breasts, with variable color palettes and dense stitching. Nearby, Abad’s paintings Masks from Six Continents (1990–93) were shown together for the first time since their commission for the Metro Center transit station in Washington, DC, where they were intended to acknowledge the diversity of the United States’s migratory flows. Abad interpreted select Indigenous masks as representatives of their respective continental geographies. Today, the flamboyant parade of Mayan, Hopi, Kongo, Māori, and Javanese referents, as well as a “European” mask recycled from the Bacongo series—in a subversive reference to the colonialist expropriation of Indigenous art—has stirred a wide range of critical conversations, especially around cultural appropriation, solidarity, and belonging.
As the pink realm of “Masks and Spirits” transitioned to a pale yellow marking Abad’s human-centric works of the “Immigrant Experience” series, the curatorial intention of colored rooms began to vibrate beyond exhibition design. Floor-to-ceiling hues pronounced the low height of the undulating prefab ceiling of the Walker’s galleries, creating a spatial horizontality that felt communal. While each gallery had vitrines of extensive documentary footnotes, the deep-red-painted alcove “Pacita at Home” revealed the fluidity between Abad’s overflowing, colorful residences where the fine and decorative arts merged with the functional as she might have used a single piece of fabric in an artwork, her clothing, or a DIY party invitation. When asked in a 1991 interview what she had contributed to American art, Abad exclaimed, “Color! I have given it color!”
Many of Abad’s works are two-sided, revealing the intricate needlework of her self-coined “trapunto” painting technique (from the Italian word meaning “to embroider,” trapungere). By hand-stitching backing cloth to her painted canvases, Abada created low- relief, quilt-like surfaces that she would further embellish by stitching other materials on the surface, ranging from cowrie shells, rickrack, shisha mirror, sequins, and textile fragments. In the prismatic and provocative trapunto L.A. Liberty (1992), Abad attempted to update the monumental welcome originally represented by the Statue of Liberty. Switching out Lady Liberty’s monochromatic, neoclassical robes with a multicolored patchwork gown adorned with plastic buttons, Abad converted the green patina of her skin to brown, reflecting the title’s double reference to Los Angeles and Latin America.
Rejecting the settler- colonialist sense of space and time found in perspectival realism, Abad often merged multiple scenes and scales into one trapunto, as seen in the montage-like quality of her Immigrant Experience (1983–95) series. In the vertical canvas Girls in Ermita (1983), a red ground hosts miniature female figures in bikinis and lingerie, posing confidently, floating on each side of a central column with neon signs advertising their skills and services. Abad’s visual acknowledgement attempts to dignify migrant sex workers in Manila’s red-light district, a legacy of the World War II-era American military occupation. Abad’s perspective on the American immigrant experience, I Thought the Streets Were Paved with Gold (1991), amalgamates several vignettes of working- class life in the United States, forming a union of portraits accompanied by hand-written text naming the essential yet precarious labor of immigrants, such as construction work, housekeeping, and nursing.
Whether in her social-realist paintings or her abstractions, Abad maintained a loose distinction between foreground and background. This approach later transitioned to total groundlessness, as seen in the third realm of the exhibition, “Abstractions,” which aptly opened with a massive five- by-five meter work, 100 Years of Freedom: From Batanes to Jolo (1998), assembled from textile scraps from multiple communities across the 7,000-plus islands of the Philippines. Borrowing the shape from a ceremonial wedding flag in Mindanao, Abad stitched together a complex variation of fibers and patterns, which can be seen as a travel diary and ethno- national banner that embodies centuries of precolonial globalization and maritime trade. The surrounding series of rectilinear trapuntos continued an inclusive embrace of how Abad’s practice can be contextualized as abstraction within multiple political, social, and art histories. Her confident patchwork and spontaneously layered, patterned fields are haptically charged with diverse references, from the modernist whitewashing of Manila’s streets to the improvisational energy of jazz music playing in her studio during her radiotherapy treatment for cancer in 2004.
Architect Edward Larrabee Barnes designed the Walker’s galleries for a “subtle sense of going somewhere, like a river.” The life and work of Pacita Abad did just that, until they merged with the ocean in the exhibition’s final gallery—a watery blue realm of dramatic depth made by the seven- meter ceiling of Herzog and de Meuron’s galleries in the museum’s 21st-century addition. There, in the awe-inspiring environment of the Underwater Wilderness (1983–96) trapuntos, there is no need for the scuba gear that Abad famously wore at the debut of this series at the Ayala Museum in Manila in 1986. The titles geolocate Abad’s dives—Dumaguete’s Underwater Garden (1987) or The Far Side of Apo Island (1989), while her paintings’ maximalist scale and shining, mixed-media surfaces lure us into unique aquatic worlds of seaweed, coral, and fish. This more-than- human realm began to echo details from previous galleries’ works: the rickrack deployed as seaweed recalled the barbed wire in Haitians Waiting at Guantanamo Bay (1994), while the fabric used as cephalopod camouflage later reanimated figures in Cross-cultural Dressing (Julia, Amina, Maya and Sammy) (1993).
Concluding this exhibition was an unexpected outlier, hanging in the staircase of the foyer. The most highly adorned trapunto, Marcos and His Cronies (1985–95) simulates Sri Lankan Maha Kola masks used during a Sanni Yakuma exorcism dances, summoning and banishing the demons—in this case, Marcos’s leadership— from a sick patient (read: the Philippines’ nation). While this totemic lineup of grotesque figures (who had inadvertently sent Abad on her transnational journey as an artist) commemorates the overthrow of the Marcos regime in 1986, the painting now appears to haunt the Marcos family’s current regime.
“Pacita Abad” presented the artist as an inspired and tenacious maker and inhabitant of many simultaneous worlds. Throughout, Abad’s use of color, including her own kayumanggi (Tagalog for “brown skin”), and borloloy (“excess ornamentation”) are dually animated—artistically and curatorially—as a politics of belonging within and without colonial recognition. Her complex personhood and multifarious aesthetics engender a timely gift to the context of the Walker Art Center and Minneapolis, as the museum strives to articulate its relationship with Indigenous lands and waters as well as the diverse beings that call these places home.
—ERIN ROBIDEAUX GLEESON
