Pacita Abad: Colors of My Dream

Pacita Abad 1946–2004

Born in Batanes, the furthermost-north island state in the Philippines, Pacita Abad (1946-2004) was sent to the US to finish her graduate studies after political violence initiated by Ferdinand Marcos put her life in danger. Abad settled in San Francisco in 1970, drawn in by the Summer of Love, and met Jack Garrity a few years later, the two embarking upon a yearlong odyssey across Asia in 1973. While this trip and its myriad multicultural interactions convinced Abad to devote herself to art, it also foreshadowed the itinerant, global lifestyle that would characterize her artistic practice.

Widely defined by her use of color, something she remained adamant about from her early studies, Abad 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. Her oeuvre featured an immense array of subject matter, from tribal masks and social realist tableaus to lush and intricately rendered underwater scenes and abstractions. Accumulating materials, techniques, and subjects from her vast travels, oftentimes within the same composition, Abad was uniquely positioned to explore modernity’s uneven development with the greatest care, as a figure born outside of the metropole. 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.

Her work has been featured at notable exhibitions, including the 11th Berlin Biennale; 13th Gwangju Biennale; 4th Kathmandu Triennale; Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, a travelling exhibition organized by the Asia Society, New York; Beyond the Border: Art by Recent Immigrants, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; La Segunda Bienal de la Habana, Cuba; and Second Contemporary Asian Art Show, Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan. She has also participated in group exhibitions at institutions including: Haus Der Kunst, Germany; Tate Liverpool; Para Site, Hong Kong; and the National Gallery, Singapore. Her work can be found in the collections of Tate Modern, London; The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C., M+ Museum, Hong Kong and the National Gallery of Singapore. She died in Singapore in 2004.

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

— Pacita Abad (1946-2004)

Pacita Abad Colors of My Dream

Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present its first major solo exhibition of Pacita Abad (1946-2004), a Filipina-American visual artist. Spotlighting Pacita’s abstract body of work created between 1985 and 2002, this exhibition offers a close look at the development of a vibrant and distinctive style as she pushed the traditional boundary of painting over the course of her 32-year career. Pacita’s oeuvre was informed by her itinerancy and deep engagement with and awareness of issues of globalization, transnationalism, and migration. Incorporating materials and techniques from Manila, Seoul, and Jakarta, the works in this exhibition highlight Pacita’s travels across Southeast Asia. This presentation simultaneously considers her use of color and material ornamentation as a strategy of resistance against the homogenizing modernist paradigm, while forging a transcultural solidarity.

Born in Batanes, Philippines to politically engaged parents, Pacita Abad settled in the US in the 1970s, forced to flee after leading student demonstrations against the Marcos regime, subsequently beginning what would be a prolific artistic career. Pacita innovated a form of textile-painting called trapunto she painted, stitched, padded, and embellished unstretched canvases to create a dimensional object with expanded surface and portability, allowing for fluid and spontaneous artistic experimentation. Her trapuntos translate lived experience by incorporating indigenous materials, ranging from Rabari mirrored embroidery from India, bark cloth from Papua New Guinea, huipils from Guatemala and Mexico, and batik and ikat from Indonesia, forming what

Stanka Radovic terms “a living tapestry of places.” Pacita Abad lived on six continents and traveled to over sixty countries, which led to the encounter and absorption of global textile traditions and techniques.

Pacita’s early foray into abstraction began in the mid 1980s, when she returned to live in Manila after a twelveyear leave. Sampaloc Walls (1985), a seminal work that refers to peeling paint on the walls of downtown Manila, engages with the socio-political context of the locale—the city walls bare and painted white as part of Marcos’ authoritarian self-legitimizing campaign. The work formally and narratively links to Palengke (1986), adorned with glittering mirrors and buttons. It recalls the sensory experience of strolling through Divisoria, the sprawling public market where Pacita and her family bought fabric and textiles. The method of stitching and padding the canvas further enhances the undulating effect that alludes to the constant circulation of commodities, goods, and people.

Pacita Abad learned textile-based skills such as sewing, crocheting, embroidering, and lacemaking at a young age from her mother while growing up in Manila with her eleven siblings. It was while living in Boston in 1981 that she was introduced to the trapunto by her friend Barbara Newman, a doll-maker, and continued to explore and transform this technique. From 1983 to 1992, Pacita’s first series of large abstract paintings called “Asian Abstractions” took inspiration from Korean ink brush painting that she briefly studied in Seoul in 1983. The original rice stalk design is developed

Installation view of Pacita Abad: Colors of My Dream at Tina Kim Gallery, New York (May 18 - June 24, 2023).

Photo: Charles Roussel.

into a silkscreen print, migrated to the top canvas, delineated with running stitches, and enhanced through the gradual addition of colors. The back of the works reveal a constellation of intricate patterns that echo the front, centering handicraft as creative labor and revealing Pacita’s structural experimentation.

Pacita’s vigorous fusion of paint, material embellishment, and color are on full display in her later abstractions. Moving from the United States to Indonesia in 1993 in search of a renewed sense of color, Pacita became fascinated with Indonesian textiles and other indigenous art forms like the Wayang puppetry. In Bandung (1999), a polyphony of colors and patterns unfurl across the surface as Pacita worked to subsume the Indonesian batik fabrics into the painted lattices, coalescing into a mass of pulsating energy. The title contains a dual reference to the Bandung Conference of 1955, when representatives from twentynine governments of Asian and African nations gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to discuss peace and the role of the Third World in a time of decolonization. Arguably among her most personal and reflective, “Endless Blues” series comprises the final large-scale paintings by Pacita, during a period of heightened emotion and creativity following her cancer diagnosis and the aftermath of 9/11. Highly expressive while paying homage to Blues music, these works embody both introspection and refusal to retreat into silence.

While Pacita’s propensity to take her paintings into the realm of social inquiry may be most evident in figurative works like the “Immigrant Experience” and

“Masks and Spirits” series, her “tropical aesthetic” and ornamental lexicon serve to activate the political possibility of abstraction. As a woman of color whose life was often in transit but whose vision was global, Pacita cannot be easily balkanized into a singular category. In Fresh Talk/Daring Gaze, Faith Ringgold points out that Pacita’s sense of coloration augments the visibility of both her work and person and relates it to the experience of sexism and racism faced by the racial others. Viewed through such lens, color is the thread that connects the various cultural, economic, and historical peripherals and a way of standing with diasporic or marginalized communities. Pacita’s abstractions transmute cultural specificity into collectivity, inverting the mechanics of marginalization while carving out a new space in which cultures, identities, and materialities may intersect and form new meanings.

Including paintings from important private collections as well as from Pacita Abad Art Estate, this solo presentation will be one of the first in New York City devoted to Abad in over twenty years. The exhibition takes place concurrently with a major traveling retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, curated by Victoria Sung with assistance from Matthew Villar Miranda. The retrospective will travel to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and MoMA PS1, New York. Abad’s works are in the permanent collection of Tate Modern, M+ Hong Kong, National Gallery Singapore, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Walker Art Center, and major institutions around the world.

Colors of My Dream, 2002. Oil, painted cloth stitched on canvas. 100 1/2 x 71 1/2 in. 255.3 x 181.6 cm.

Installation view of Pacita Abad: Colors of My Dream at Tina Kim Gallery, New York (May 18 - June 24, 2023).

Installation view of Pacita Abad: Colors of My Dream at Tina Kim Gallery, New York (May 18 - June 24, 2023).

Photo: Charles Roussel.

Installation view of Pacita Abad: Colors of My Dream at Tina Kim Gallery, New York (May 18 - June 24, 2023).

Photo: Charles Roussel.

Installation view of Pacita Abad: Colors of My Dream at Tina Kim Gallery, New York (May 18 - June 24, 2023).

Photo: Charles Roussel.

Installation view of Pacita Abad: Colors of My Dream at Tina Kim Gallery, New York (May 18 - June 24, 2023).

Photo: Charles Roussel.

Installation view of Pacita Abad: Colors of My Dream at Tina Kim Gallery, New York (May 18 - June 24, 2023).

Photo: Charles Roussel.

Installation view of Pacita Abad: Colors of My Dream at Tina Kim Gallery, New York (May 18 - June 24, 2023).

Photo: Charles Roussel.

Installation view of Pacita Abad: Colors of My Dream at Tina Kim Gallery, New York (May 18 - June 24, 2023).

Photo: Charles Roussel.

Stella by Starlight, 2002. Oil, Nias batik, batik, printed cloth on stitched canvas. 90 x 72 in, 228.6 x 182.9 cm.

Each color represents something; each material represents something. Pacita was pulling from so many different sources. And I think when we’re looking at this generation of artists – it’s not, we’re living through the 60s, 70s, et cetera [...] there’s an opening up, and looking at other spiritual practices and traditions, other cultures. And it’s interesting to me that Pacita comes to California, and then goes back to the Philippines and has a rediscovery of her own culture. I think there’s this radicality in artists [...] who are pulling from tradition, at-risk practices and cultures, and working to preserve them, to honor them, to share them more widely. And so there is a celebration and joy that comes into that. I think we really see this in Pacita’s work quite strongly.

— Ruba Katrib

Colors of My Dream, 2002. Oil, painted cloth stitched on canvas. 100 1/2 x 71 1/2 in. 255.3 x 181.6 cm.

Colorful Nights, 1996. Oil, mirrors, buttons, plastic pearls stitched on canvas. 59 x 110 in 149 7/8 x 279 3/8 cm

Yellow Spider (Flame), 1990. Acrylic, buttons, mirrors on silk screened, stitched and padded canvas. 79 x 56 in 200.7 x 142.2 cm

Strange Fruit, 2002. Oil, painted cloth, painted tin stitched on canvas. 40 1/4 x 28 3/4 x 2 in, 101.2 x 73 x 5.1 cm.

Bandung, 1999. Oil, painted batik cloth stitched on canvas. 87 x 58 in, 221 x 149.2 cm.

Pacita did thousands of works and titled every single one. There’s another one here called Bandung, which references the Bandung Conference, which was one of the first largescale meetings of African and African-Asian states. So there’s a lot of political undercurrent that’s super interesting, because when you first see these works, they just appear super funky and futuristic, and of course, incorporating these traditional textile traditions, but then they have a very strong point of view.

— Victoria Sung

Bandung, 1999. Oil, painted batik cloth stitched on canvas. 87 x 58 in, 221 x 149.2 cm.

Sampaloc, 1985. Acrylic, mirrors, buttons on stitched and padded canvas. 79 x 98 1/2 in, 182.9 x 250.2 cm

1992. Oil, acrylic on silkscreened, stitched and padded canvas. 84 x 58 in, 213.4 x 147.3 cm.

Pacita was pulling on materials from so many different parts of her travels. On the surface, she is painting with acrylic or oil, but they’re made in a form that is more similar to hand quilting. She would paint her surfaces, but then she would add a layer of batting or stuffing, add a backing layer to that, and then stitch all of those layers together. And using hand stitching, which is interesting because artists like Faith Ringgold (a contemporary of Pacita’s who actually wrote about Pacita in the early 2000s) primarily used machine stitching in the making of her works. But Pacita refused to use a sewing machine because she loved the irregularity and the dimensionality that the hand-stitching would bring to these works.

— Victoria Sung

Palengke, 1986. Oil, acrylic, mirrors, buttons on stitched and padded canvas. 99 x 82 in, 251.5 x 208.3 cm

Emotional Rescue, 1991. Oil, acrylic, painted cloth, buttons on stitched and padded canvas. 92 x 89 in, 233.7 x 226.1 cm

This kind of patterning and decoration, this overabundance, this exuberance, it’s really a formal and politically intentional way of thinking that was very different from what we were seeing in the art world at the time. If you think about the 80s or 90s when many of these works were being made, especially in terms of a Western art historical canon, there’s Minimalism and Conceptualism – that’s what was being heralded in different art circles here in New York or other parts of the Western art world. And Pacita was making this really exuberant, I mean, some would describe as busy patterns, artwork. And so there’s something really interesting there about where that was coming from or what point she was making in doing that and very intentionally maybe pushing against the standards of what was considered “good taste”.

— Victoria Sung

Orchid Fever, 2001. Oil, painted cloth stitched on canvas. 97 3/8 x 72 in, 247.3 x 182.9 cm

2003. Oil, painted batik cloth stitched on canvas. 95 x 71 3/4 in, 241.3 x 182.2 cm.

1946

Pacita Abad is born on the 5th of October in Basco, Batanes, the northernmost and smallest province in the Philippines, to Jorge Abad and Aurora Barsana Abad. She is the fifth of thirteen children.

1949

Pacita’s father, Jorge Abad, is elected to the Philippine House of Representatives. The family relocates from Basco to Manila at the end of his first term.

1962

Jorge Abad is appointed Minister of Public Works and Communications; Aurora Abad becomes the Congresswoman representing Batanes.

1964

Intending to follow in her parents’ footsteps, Pacita attends the University of the Philippines and studies Political Science.

Aurora and Jorge Abadwith ten of their children, 1965.

1965

Ferdinand Marcos is elected president of the Philippines. Jorge Abad declines to remain as secretary of public works in the administration.

1967

The Summer of Love takes place in San Francisco.

1968

Pacita graduates with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science. She is active in the Batanes Youth Circle and other university clubs that promote civic participation.

1969

Ferdinand Marcos launches a $50 million infrastructure project funded by foreign debt during his re-election campaign.

Pacita organizes student demonstrations in Manila protesting the fraudulent election and opposing the Marcos regime.

Pacita Abad’s graduation photo from the University of the Philippines, 1969.

Pacita Abad (seated, with handbag) and student demonstrators meeting with President Ferdinand Marcos (far right, seated at desk) after marching to Malacañang Palace, 1969.

Pacita is urged to leave Manila and finish her law degree in Madrid out of concern for her safety. En route to Spain, she visits an aunt in San Francisco and decides to study in the United States.

While applying to schools, she works two jobs, as a secretary during the day and as a seamstress at night.

Pacita pursues a master’s degree in history at Lone Mountain College and becomes involved in Asian American social and political organizations in the Bay Area.

Ferdinand Marcos declares martial law.

Pacita obtains her master’s degree and is offered a full scholarship from UC Berkeley Law School.

At a regional World Affairs Conference in Monterey, she meets Jack Garrity, a graduate student from Boston and decides to defer law school to travel across Asia with him. They hitchhike from Turkey to the Philippines.

Pacita Abad, wearing a bright yellow crocheted shawl, riding a cable car in San Francisco, 1971.

1974

Pacita returns to the Philippines and explores her native country for two months with Jack and becomes inspired by textile traditions from various regions.

Upon her return to California, she decides to forgo her law school scholarship and begins painting.

1976

Pacita and Jack move to Washington, D.C., where Pacita begins her first formal art training at the Corcoran School of Art. The couple goes to Guatemala for a month-long trip at the end of the year and Pacita starts painting churches, ruins, and villages during the journey.

1977

Pacita holds her first exhibition of 70 paintings at 15th Street, D.C. studio. The couple moves to New York City, where Pacita studies figurative painting at the Art Students League.

Pacita Abad and Jack Garrity traveling by boat through Pagsanjan Falls, Philippines, 1974.

Pacita Abad at her first exhibition opening, hosted at her D.C. studio and home, 1977.

Pacita and Jack move to Dhaka, Bangladesh for a year. Pacita travels to Nepal to visit a Tibetan refugee camp, where she is intrigued by the rolled Buddhist Thangka paintings, a precursor to her signature trapuntos

Jorge Abad passes away unexpectedly. Pacita returns to Manila.

Pacita and Jack travel to Sudan for three months.

Pacita and Jack move to Boston for the next two years.

Pacita begins to experiment with stitching and stuffing her painted canvas at the encouragement of her friend Barbara Newman, a dollmaker. She begins to incorporate found textiles into her paintings.

Pacita and Jack return to live in Manila for the next four years. Pacita takes two long trips to Papua New Guinea and begins a series of fifteen paintings inspired by indigenous tribes.

In Indonesia, she becomes fascinated with the wayangs, which will be a major motif in her paintings.

Pacita holds her first major solo exhibition A Painter Looks at the World at the Museum of Philippine Art. The exhibition includes 120 paintings inspired by her travels to Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.

Pacita becomes the first woman to receive the Ten Outstanding Young Men award for the most outstanding artist in the Philippines.

Pacita travels to Seoul, Korea and learns ink brush painting. Her trip leads to a series of trapuntos called Asian Abstractions based on rice stalk patterns.

Pacita shows Santa Mesa Walls in the 2nd Asia Art Show at Fukuoka Art Museum.

Exhibition poster of Pacita Abad, A Painter Looks at the World, 1984.

Pacita Abad with Assaulting the Eye with Ecstasy (1984) in her Manila studio.

The Marcos regime collapses in February.

Pacita returns to D.C. with Jack, who begins working for the World Bank.

Pacita is invited to exhibit in the second Havana Biennial.

She presents her abstract trapuntos in a solo exhibition titled Oriental Abstractions at the Hong Kong Arts Center.

In conjunction with the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics, Pacita is selected as one of the 100 international painters to exhibit at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.

She meets with Joan Mitchell in D.C. and visits fellow Filipino-American painter Alfonso Ossorio in his studio in East Hampton. Both their works incorporate objects from their travels.

Pacita Abad at her solo exhibition Oriental Abstractions, Hong Kong Arts Center, 1986.

Pacita Abad with artist Alfonso Ossorio, 1988.

Pacita wins the Metro Art Award and installs a 50-foot mural entitled Masks from Six Continents at the Metro Center subway station in D.C. The works remain on public display for three years.

Pacita is devastated by the loss of her mother Aurora Abad, who was Pacita’s role model and a lifelong inspiration to her.

Pacita holds a solo exhibition of her large-scale paintings, entitled Abstract Emotions at the Philippine Center in NYC.

She takes part in Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, an exhibition organized by the Asia Society, curated by Margo Machida. It tours the US until 1996, traveling to the Walker Art Center and other venues.

Pacita and Jack move to Jakarta, Indonesia.

Photograph of Pacita Abad’s Masks from Six Continents (1990–93) at the Metro Center, Washington, D.C., 1990.

Pacita holds a solo exhibition Wayang, Irian and Sumba at the National Museum in Jakarta.

Pacita becomes a naturalized US citizen. She is featured in a CBS documentary called Pacita Abad: Wild at Art.

She participates in several group exhibitions in the US and abroad, including Contemporary Art of the Non-Aligned Countries at the National Gallery of Indonesia.

Pacita holds a solo exhibition Exploring the Spirit at the National Gallery of Indonesia.

Pacita travels through Java, Sumatra, Sumba, and Sulawes, gathering batik and ikat materials for her paintings. She participates in the World Batik Exhibition in Yogyakarta, demonstrating the deep influence of Indonesian textiles on her practice.

Installation view of Pacita Abad: Artist + Community, 1994. Courtesy the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Pacita at the opening of Exploring the Spirit, 1996.

Pacita creates a monumental abstract painting The Sky is Falling, the Sky is Falling in response to the aftermath of the 1997 Asia financial crisis.

Pacita holds four Door to Life exhibits of her recent paintings inspired by her stay in Yemen.

Pacita spends six weeks in Rajasthan, India, returning to her studio to work on a body of work (The Sky is the Limit), her homage to India.

Pacita moves to Singapore after seven years in Jakarta

Pacita Abad at the opening of her exhibition Abstract Emotions, at the National Museum, Jakarta, Indonesia, with 100 Years of Freedom: From Batanes to Jolo, 1998.

Exhibition poster of Pacita Abad, Abstract Emotions, 1998.

2001 2002

Pacita and Jack start building a new home and studio in Batanes, which they call Fundacion Pacita.

Pacita visits Ground Zero two weeks after 9/11. She decides to create three commemorative murals as part of the 9/11 Phoenix Project in collaboration with the 30 local women artists in her trapunto workshop.

She returns to D.C. and is shocked to discover that she has advanced lung cancer.

Pacita undergoes chemotherapy in Singapore. She begins work on her last series of large-scale trapunto paintings called Endless Blues

Pacita Abad pinning Hundred Sleepless Hours (2001) to her studio wall in Singapore, 2001.

Pacita Abad, Life in the Margins (2022). Oil, printed cloth, painted cloth stitched on canvas, 269 x 152 cm. Image courtesy of Pacita Abad Art Estate.

Photograph by Max McClure, courtesy of Spike Island.

Pacita organizes the painting of the 180-foot-long Alkaff Bridge while undergoing chemotherapy. The Singapore ArtBridge was inaugurated on January 29 as her gift to the people of Singapore.

She travels to the Philippines to open Circles In My Mind at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the last exhibition of her thirty-two year career.

On December 7, Pacita Abad passes away in Singapore after a three-year battle with cancer.

Pacita’s legacy is maintained by Pacita Abad Art Estate. Her family promotes the growth of a vibrant artistic community in Batanes through Fundacion Pacita.

Fundacion Pacita. Rjruiziii, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Photograph by Opal Bala.

This catalogue was produced by Tina Kim Gallery and Pacita Abad Art Estate to accompany the exhibition Pacita Abad: Colors of My Dream , which was on view from May 18 through June 24, 2023. It includes quotations from a curators discussion that took place at the gallery on May 19, 2023 with Victoria Sung and Ruba Katrib.

Victoria Sung is currently the Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. From 2015 to 2023, she was a curator at the Walker Art Center, where she organized Pacita Abad’s retrospective as well as Pao Houa Her: Paj qaum ntuj / Flowers of the Sky (2022); Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping (2021; co-organized with the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts); Rayyane Tabet: Deep Blues (2021); Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall (2019), and Siah Armajani: Follow This Line (2018; co-organized with the Metropolitan Museum of Art), among others. Prior to the Walker, she worked at arts institutions in New York, including the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Ruba Katrib is the Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoMA PS1 in New York. At PS1 she has curated exhibitions such as Jumana Manna: Break, Take, Erase, Tally (2022), Greater New York (2021), Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life (2021), and Simone Fattal’s retrospective in 2019, among others. From 2012 to 2018, she was Curator at SculptureCenter in New York, where she organized over twenty exhibitions including 74 million million million tons (2018) (co-organized with artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan) and solo shows for artists such as Carissa Rodriguez, Kelly Akashi, Sam Anderson, Teresa Burga, Nicola L., and Charlotte Prodger. In 2018, Katrib co-curated SITE Santa Fe’s biennial, Casa Tomada, along with José Luis Blondet and Candice Hopkins.

Copyright 2023

Tina Kim Gallery

All artworks by Pacita Abad ©Pacita Abad Art Estate

All images courtesy of Pacita Abad Art Estate and Tina Kim Gallery.

Photo: Charles Roussel, Hyunjung Rhee and Lyn Nguyen