# Pacita Abad

Pacita Barsana Abad (October 5, 1946 – December 7, 2004) was a Filipino-born American Ivatan self-taught visual artist. Her more than 30-year painting career began when she traveled to the United States to undertake graduate studies in Spain. She exhibited her work in over 200 museums, galleries and other venues, including 75 solo shows, around the world. Abad's work is now in public, corporate and private art collections in over 70 countries.

## Early life and education

Pacita Barsana Abad was born in Basco, Batanes, on October 5, 1946. She was the fifth of thirteen children between Aurora Barsana and Jorge Abad.
From 1949 to 1972, her father, Jorge Abad, represented the lone district of Batanes for a total of five nonconsecutive terms in the Congress of the Philippines. Her mother, Aurora Abad, served for one term (1966 to 1969) in the same elected position as her husband after he was appointed secretary of public works and highways by President Diosdado Macapagal. The Abad family moved from Batanes to Manila at the end of Jorge's first term.
In Manila, Abad attended Legarda Elementary School and Ramon Magsaysay High School.
She graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman with a Bachelor of Arts in political science in 1968. The following year, she began graduate studies in law at the same institution. During that time, she also began organizing student demonstrations protesting brutal tactics employed in the 1969 general election, including those used in Batanes, where her father was running for another term. Following a demonstration near Malacañang, Abad and several of her fellow student demonstrators met with President Ferdinand Marcos, drawing national media attention to their protest.
The Abad family home in Manila soon became a target of violence and was gunned one evening. Although nobody was harmed, following the incident, Abad was encouraged by her parents to leave the country and continue her law studies in Spain. In 1970, on the way to Europe, she visited an aunt in San Francisco and decided to stay in the United States instead.
While supporting herself with two jobs, working as a secretary during the day and as a seamstress at night, Abad took up a graduate program in Asian history at Lone Mountain College. In 1973 she completed a doctoral dissertation on The Role of Emilio Aguinaldo in the Acquisition of the Philippines by the United States from Spain: 1898. After receiving her masters in 1973, she was offered a scholarship to attend the Boalt Law School at the University of California, Berkeley. However, Abad deferred her enrollment after meeting Stanford graduate student Jack Garrity. The two traveled across Asia for a year, including a two-month stay in the Philippines. Upon returning to California, Abad relinquished her law school scholarship and took up painting.
The couple later moved to Washington D.C. and then to New York City, where Abad took up formal painting classes at the Corcoran School of Art and the Art Students League of New York, respectively. At the Art Students League, Abad concentrated on still life, and figurative painting under John Heliker and Robert Beverly Hale.

## Personal life

In 1971, after Abad first moved to San Francisco, she met and married artist George Kleiman. Though they separated shortly after, Abad credited Kleiman for introducing her to the art world.
In 1973, while at a regional World Affairs Conference in Monterey, California, Abad met Jack Garrity, a graduate student at Stanford studying international finance. The two decided to travel across Asia for a year together. They remained together upon returning to the United States. Later on, Garrity's work as a development economist brought the couple to live and travel to over 60 countries.
Abad was naturalized as a citizen of the United States in 1994.

## Career

From 1978 to 1980, Abad traveled with Garrity as his work brought them to Bangladesh, Sudan, and Thailand. During this time, Abad traveled the region, learning about Indigenous art techniques and traditions, as well as encountering refugee camps, the experiences later informing her work as an artist.
In Thailand, her attention was drawn to the refugee crisis along the Thai-Cambodian border following the outbreak of the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. During several trips to the refugee camps at the border assisting in relief work, she spent time with the refugees, journalists, and relief administrators, and began to draw sketches and take photographs. Towards the end of 1979, Abad was painting from the material she gathered and, by April 1980, she exhibited the 24-painting-series Portraits of Kampuchea, also known as the Cambodian Refugee series, at the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art in Bangkok. Abad's exhibit didn't include one of her most notable works, Flight to Freedom (1980), as she was still in the process of completing it.
From 1980 to 1982, Abad lived in Boston while Garrity took up a two-year graduate program at Boston University. She started her Masks and Spirits series in 1981 with her first trapunto painting.
In 1982, the couple moved to Manila, where Garrity worked for the Asian Development Bank. Abad held two major solo exhibits in her home country: in 1984, Pacita Abad: A Philippine Painter Looks at the World, curated by Arturo Luz, at the Museum of Philippine Art; and in 1985, Pacita Abad: Paintings of People and Landscapes of Batanes, curated by Ray Albano, at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
In 1986, Abad and Garrity moved back to Washington D.C. for the latter's work at the World Bank.

## Works

Her early paintings were primarily figurative socio-political works of people and primitive masks. Another series was large scale paintings of underwater scenes, tropical flowers and animal wildlife. Pacita's most extensive body of work, however, is her vibrant, colorful abstract work - many very large scale canvases, but also a number of small collages - on a range of materials from canvas and paper to bark cloth, metal, ceramics and glass. Abad created over 4,500 artworks. She painted a 55-meter long Alkaff Bridge in Singapore and covered it with 2,350 multicolored circles, just a few months before she died.
Abad developed a technique of trapunto painting (named after a quilting technique), which entailed stitching and stuffing her painted canvases to give them a three-dimensional, sculptural effect. She then began incorporating into the surface of her paintings materials such as traditional cloth, mirrors, beads, shells, plastic buttons and other objects.
Abad had also received numerous awards during her artistic career in which her most memorable award was her first. Abad had received the Ten Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) of the Philippines award in the Arts in 1984, an award that has always been given to men for the last 25 years until in 1984 where Abad became the first woman ever to receive this prestigious award. In Abad receiving this award, it had created a public uproar where angry letters sent to editors of published newspapers from men and male artists who thought that they, not Abad, should have received the award. Despite such uproar, Abad was thrilled that she had broken the sex barrier in which she stated in her acceptance speech that "it was long overdue that Filipina women were recognized, as the Philippines was full of outstanding women" and referred proudly to her mother.
The 1985 lost artworks, an expressionist oil painting “Sapuno” (Batanes Series) is part of Abad's 1985 Cultural Center of the Philippines exhibit, “Paintings of People and Landscapes of Batanes”. It recently resurfaced at León Gallery, Legazpi Village, Makati Central Business District, when an anonymous owner purchased it with a description “a memory of her backyard in Batanes.”

## Death

After a three-year battle with lung cancer, Abad died in Singapore on December 7, 2004. She is buried in Batanes, next to her vacation home-and-studio Fundacion Pacita.

## Legacy

Abad's works have been displayed in galleries and museums in the Philippines during the annual Philippine Arts Month and art festivals.
In 2019, Tate Modern exhibited Abad's 3 quilted canvas works - "Bacongo III-IV" (1986) and "European Mask" (1990). In the same year, Abad's trapunto quilting paintings were shown in Frieze London.
In 2023, the first major retrospective of Abad was held. The exhibition opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, followed by MoMA PS1 in New York, and then the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. As of 2024, it is largest museum exhibit in the United States devoted to an Asian American female artist.
Her works were exhibited in Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and at the 60th Venice Biennale, among others.
On July 31, 2020, Abad was commemorated with a Google Doodle.

## Quote

"I always see the world through colour, although my vision, perspective and paintings are constantly influenced by new ideas and changing environments. I feel like I am an ambassador of colours, always projecting a positive mood that helps make the world smile."