Pacita Abad

Pacita Barsana Abad (October 5, 1946 – December 7, 2004) was a Filipino-American visual artist from the Ivatan people. She combined fiber art with painting, often using trapunto quilting on mixed-media canvases, and her work is known for its intense, vibrant colors. Over a career spanning more than three decades, her pieces appeared in over 200 museums, galleries, and other venues worldwide, including 75 solo exhibitions. Today, her art is held in public, corporate, and private collections across more than 70 countries.

Abad was born in Basco, Batanes, on October 5, 1946, the fifth of thirteen children. Her father, Jorge Abad, served five nonconsecutive terms representing Batanes’ lone district in the Philippine Congress from 1949 to 1972. Her mother, Aurora Abad, held the same seat for one term (1966–1969) after Jorge was appointed secretary of public works and highways by President Diosdado Macapagal. The family moved from Batanes to Manila after Jorge’s first term, returning temporarily during his reelection campaigns. In Manila, Pacita attended Legarda Elementary School and Ramon Magsaysay High School. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of the Philippines Diliman in 1968 and began graduate law studies there the following year. During this time, she helped organize student protests against brutal tactics used in the 1969 Philippine general election, including those in Batanes, where her father was running again. After a demonstration near Malacañang, she and other student leaders met with President Ferdinand Marcos, drawing national media attention. Her father successfully challenged his 1969 election loss before the Commission on Elections and the Supreme Court, but the family home in Manila was shot at. Though no one was hurt, her parents urged her to leave the country and continue law studies in Spain. In 1970, en route to Madrid, she visited an aunt in San Francisco and decided to stay in the United States. While working as a secretary and home seamstress, she began a graduate program in Asian history at Lone Mountain College, earning a master’s degree in 1973 with a thesis on Emilio Aguinaldo’s role in the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines. She was offered a scholarship to Boalt Law School at UC Berkeley but deferred after meeting Stanford graduate student Jack Garrity. The two traveled across Asia for a year, including two months in the Philippines. Upon returning to California, she gave up her law scholarship and took up painting. She later moved with Garrity to Washington, D.C., and then New York City, where she took painting classes at the Art Students League of New York and the Corcoran School of Art, studying still life and figurative art under John Heliker and Robert Beverly Hale.

From 1978 to 1980, Abad traveled with Garrity to Bangladesh, Sudan, and Thailand for his work. During these trips, she learned about Indigenous art techniques and visited refugee camps, experiences that later shaped her art. In Thailand, she focused on the refugee crisis along the Cambodia–Thailand border after the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. She made several trips to border camps to assist with relief work, spending time with refugees, journalists, and administrators, and began sketching and photographing. By late 1979, she was painting from this material, and in April 1980, she exhibited the 24-painting series *Portraits of Kampuchea* (also called the Cambodian Refugee series) at the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art in Bangkok. The show did not include her notable work *Flight to Freedom* (1980), which was still unfinished. From 1980 to 1982, she lived in Boston while Garrity attended a graduate program at Boston University. Working at the Art Institute of Boston, she joined a weekly women artists’ group and, with help from fabric artist Barbara Newman, developed her trapunto painting technique. In 1981, she created *African Mephisto*, the first painting in her Masks and Spirits series. In 1982, the couple moved to Manila, where Garrity worked for the Asian Development Bank. Abad held two major solo exhibits: *Pacita Abad: A Philippine Painter Looks at the World* (1984) and *Pacita Abad: Paintings of People and Landscapes of Batanes* (1985). One painting from the second exhibit, an expressionist oil called *Sapuno*, was later lost and resurfaced in a private collection in 2024. In 1986, they moved back to Washington, D.C., for Garrity’s work at the World Bank; that year, Abad co-founded the Philippine Arts, Letters, and Media Council in Washington. She received three residencies at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper in New Brunswick, New Jersey, starting in 1990, and two residencies at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville, Maryland, in 1991. Her Immigrant Experience series began after a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 1994. In 1994–95, she had a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, *Pacita Abad: Artists + Community*, and during this period she also participated in multiple group shows and a joint exhibition in Manila with Paz Abad Santos in 1995, *Thinking Big*. In 1996, she was selected for the Art in Embassies program.