Chronology of the Life and Work of Pacita Abad
Pacita Abad’s life and work reveal an artist who regarded local traditions yet held a bold will to challenge global boundaries. With a needle or sketchbook always in hand, Abad’s unique experience as a Filipina American artist traveling through more than 60 countries on six continents led her to reinvent the brilliant textures of the places she saw and retell the vivid stories of the people she met. This chronology was first published in the catalog for the exhibition Pacita Abad at the Walker Art Center on view from April 15th–September 3rd, 2023.
1946
Pacita Barsana Abad is born in Basco, Batanes, on October 5. The small grouping of islands represents the smallest and northernmost province in the Philippines. Abad is the fifth of thirteen siblings born to her parents, Aurora Abad and Jorge Abad.
The United States recognizes the independence of the Republic of the Philippines after more than three hundred years of Spanish rule (1565–1898) and nearly a half century of American sovereignty (1898–1946).
1949
Jorge Abad, a professor of civil engineering, is elected to the Philippine House of Representatives. The Abad family moves from Batanes to Manila at the end of his first term. They return to Batanes for five months every two years for his reelection campaigns.
1961
A coalition of 120 majority developing countries not formally allied with the Warsaw Pact or North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries establishes the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1995, Abad would participate in a major group exhibition titled Contemporary Art of the Non-Aligned Countries, organized by the National Gallery of Indonesia during the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic of Indonesia’s independence. Curated by G. Sheikh, T. K. Sabapathy, A. Poshyananda, and Jim Supangkat, the exhibition features artists from over forty countries largely representing the Global South.
1962
After serving five terms in Congress, Jorge Abad is appointed secretary of public works and highways by President Diosdado Macapagal. Aurora Abad campaigns for her husband’s seat and is elected to her first term in Congress.
1964
Encouraged to follow in her parents’ footsteps, Abad enters the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman, Quezon City, where she studies political science.
1965
Ferdinand Marcos is elected president of the Philippines after representing the northern province of Ilocos Norte for three congressional terms (1949–59). After his inauguration, Marcos asks Jorge Abad to remain as secretary of public works and highways. Given his loyalty to the opposition party, Abad declines.
The US Immigration Act of 1965 abolishes the immigrant quotas based on national origin, leading to a new wave of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Decades later, Abad’s ambitious body of work titled Immigrant Experience (1983–95) would center the lived experiences of immigrants of color.
Filipinx1 organizers Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz, Benjamin Gines, and Pete Velasco galvanize more than eight hundred farmworkers from ten grape vineyards in Delano, California, during the Delano Grape Strike.1 In solidarity, the predominantly Mexican and Mexican American National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), led by Cesar Chavez, Julio Hernandez, and Gilbert Padilla, joins the strikes.
Over ten thousand protesters march through Berkeley and Oakland, California, against the Vietnam War.
1966
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale found the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.
The anti-imperialist Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) is founded in Havana, in defense of human rights.
1967
Over one hundred thousand countercultural youths gather in San Francisco during what has been called the “Summer of Love.” The Haight-Ashbury district becomes the epicenter of the youth hippie counterculture, characterized by antiwar pacifism, the recreational use of mind-altering drugs, the creation of psychedelic rock, and sexual freedom.
In Loving v. Virginia, the US Supreme Court rules antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional, ending nearly three centuries of the criminalization of sexual and marital relations between whites and non-whites.
The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand form the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
1968
Pacita Abad graduates with a bachelor of arts degree in political science from UP. During her undergraduate years, she is active in the Batanes Youth Circle and other university clubs that promote civic participation.
Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee found the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley, coining the term “Asian American” as a distinct political identity.
Coalitions of students of African, Asian, Indigenous, and Latin American descent at San Francisco State College (present-day San Francisco State University) and UC Berkeley form the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) and protest the Eurocentric curricula at American universities. The two schools establish the first Asian American studies programs in the country that year.
More than 150 Chinese and Filipinx elders living at the International Hotel in San Francisco begin a nine-year-long anti-eviction campaign with grassroots, community, and student organizations.
1969
Abad begins her graduate law studies at UP.
Ferdinand Marcos runs for his second term as president. To cement his already-considerable popularity, he launches a $50 million infrastructure project—largely funded by foreign debt. Time magazine calls the election the “dirtiest, most violent and most corrupt” in Philippine modern history, and the phrase “three Gs” was widely understood to reference the “guns, goons, and gold” by which Marcos won in a landslide.
Abad participates in her father’s congressional reelection campaign in Batanes against Marcos party candidate Rufino Antonio. In the run-up to the election, a group of Suzuki Boys—named for the motorcycles they imported into and rode around Batanes—intimidate voters and tamper with ballot boxes. Antonio is declared the winner.
Abad and other students organize demonstrations in Manila to protest the fraudulent election, capturing the media’s attention and inspiring student demonstrations elsewhere. In an act of retaliation, the Abad family home in Manila is machine-gunned at night. No one is hurt. The Commission on Elections and the Supreme Court of the Philippines rule in Jorge Abad’s favor and declare him the winner.
The Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) opens with California governor Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan in attendance. Widely perceived as First Lady Imelda Marcos’s vanity project, the CCP is housed in a sprawling Brutalist-style complex with the aim of defining and promoting a nationalized Philippine art. Abad would exhibit works at the CCP twice, in 1985 and 2003.
1970
In what becomes known as the First Quarter Storm, Philippine student activists and workers protest rising inflation, increasing poverty, and rampant political corruption. The administration’s violent dispersal tactics radicalize many—including Abad’s siblings—against the Marcos regime.
Abad leaves Manila with the intent of finishing her law degree in Madrid. On the way to Spain, she visits an aunt in San Francisco. After deciding to apply to graduate programs in the United States, she works part-time as a secretary for a foundation providing medical care and refugee assistance in Laos, Cambodia, and Nepal. She also takes in work as a seamstress.
As a result of the debt-funded infrastructure spending during his reelection campaign, Marcos enters into an unpopular debt-restructuring deal with the International Monetary Fund.
1971
Abad enters the master’s program in history at Lone Mountain College (later acquired by the University of San Francisco) where she writes her thesis on Philippine history, titled, “The Role of Emilio Aguinaldo in the Acquisition of the Philippines by the United States from Spain: 1898.” She becomes aware of Asian American social and political organizing in the Bay Area and is part of a group of students that invites labor organizer Larry Itliong to speak at an event in San Francisco.
Abad meets painter George Kleiman. They marry and later live in the Haight-Ashbury district. Though the two would separate shortly after, Abad credits Kleiman with introducing her to the art world.
1972
Marcos declares martial law, prohibiting public demonstrations, restricting media, and shutting down both chambers of Congress. Over the course of fourteen years, his administration would target political dissidents, including opposition leaders, journalists, student activists, and farmworkers, leading to mass incarceration and extrajudicial killings. Abad’s brother Florencio (Butch) is arrested in 1978 and again in 1980 with his wife, Dina.
1973
After completing her master of arts degree at Lone Mountain College, Abad applies to law school and receives a scholarship to attend the UC Berkeley School of Law. A month later, Abad attends a regional World Affairs Conference in Monterey, California, where she meets Jack Garrity, a graduate student from Boston studying international finance at Stanford University.
Abad decides to defer her law school acceptance and travel across Asia with Garrity for a year. The couple begins hitchhiking overland from Turkey to the Philippines, passing through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Abad collects and wears traditional fabrics and jewelry throughout their journey.
1974
Arriving in the Philippines after four years abroad, Abad and Garrity explore her native country for two months. In the mountainous region of northern Luzon, known as the Cordilleras, Abad visits Ifugao, Bontoc, and Kalinga Indigenous peoples and meets photographer Eduardo Masferré, who would later sell native sculptures to Abad from his own collection.
In the Muslim regions of Marawi, Cotabato, and Zamboanga in Mindanao, Abad meets Maranao, T’boli, Manobo, Yakan, and Sama peoples and becomes inspired by native textile traditions such as the T’boli t’nalak weave. Abad and Garrity return to California and move into a cabin on the outskirts of Palo Alto while Garrity finishes his studies.
Abad forgoes her law school scholarship and, to the surprise of her family and friends, begins painting. Marcos enacts the Labor Code of the Philippines, creating three government agencies for the recruitment and placement of migrant workers abroad, or “overseas Filipino workers” (OFW). Abad later makes the trapunto painting Torments of a Filipino Overseas Worker (1995) as part of her Immigrant Experience series (1983–95).
1975
Abad and Garrity move to Tours, France, where Garrity finishes his last semester at Stanford and plays ice hockey professionally. Later, they travel to Egypt, Greece, and Italy.
1976
Garrity starts a new job in the Congressional Budget Office, and the couple moves to Washington, DC. Abad takes painting classes for the first time at the Corcoran School of Art. She also works as a research assistant at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
At the end of the year, Abad and Garrity go to Guatemala for a monthlong trip, and she starts painting churches, Mayan ruins, and rural villages. Before returning, she trades her Western-style clothes for handwoven huipil blouses and dresses bought at Mayan village markets.
1977
Abad meets neighbor Alma Thomas, the sole Black woman artist of the Washington Color School, and visits her home and studio. Thomas later sees Abad’s paintings and encourages her to keep working at her craft.
Abad stages her first exhibition of early paintings at her Fifteenth Street, Washington, DC, home and studio.
Abad and Garrity move to New York City. She studies anatomy, still life, and figurative painting at the Art Students League of New York with John Heliker and Robert Beverly Hale.
1978
Abad and Garrity move to Dhaka, Bangladesh, where Garrity works for one year as a transport economist. Abad meets Syed Jahangir at the Shilpakala Academy and encounters the work of artist Zainul Abedin, who famously depicted the famines in Bengal during the region's colonial period and fight for independence.
Abad travels by boat, car, bus, and rickshaw, painting landscapes and people in the cities and villages of Bangladesh. At the end of the year, she meets journalists reporting on the Teknaf refugee camp and learns about the plight of the Rohingya refugees fleeing Burma (now Myanmar).
Abad meets textile artist and designer Surayia Rahman, known for empowering women affected by poverty and war, who introduces her to the stitched art of kantha.
Abad travels to Burma and meets the Chakma peoples, noting the parallels between their textiles and those of the Indigenous peoples of the northern and southern Philippines.
Abad travels to countries in the region and visits a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal, where she sees monks roll and carry painted and appliquéd Buddhist thangka paintings. These rolled paintings would later inform Abad’s peripatetic studio practice.
Abad visits Rabindranath Tagore’s house-turned-museum in Calcutta, whose modernist style is inspired by malanggan (New Ireland) and Haida woodcarving. These encounters encourage Abad’s growing interest in social realism and, later, the incorporation of Indigenous material traditions into her artworks.
Abad’s father passes away unexpectedly, and she returns to Manila for the funeral.
On her return to Dhaka, Bangladesh, she holds an exhibition of paintings at her Dhanmondi studio.
Abad shows her Bangladesh paintings at the Manila Garden Hotel in her first exhibition in the Philippines.
1979
Garrity’s work brings the couple to Sudan for three months. Abad paints landscapes and portraits in Juba, Khartoum, Omdurman, and Wau. Curator Abdullah Shibrain invites Abad to show these paintings at the Exhibition Hall in Khartoum.
The couple moves to Bangkok, where Abad shows her paintings of Sudan at the city’s Oriental Hotel. She paints scenes of temples and markets.
The Cambodian Civil War causes a humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians seek refuge at the Thai border. Abad sketches and paints portraits of those fleeing Pol Pot’s brutal regime. These works form the Cambodian Refugee series (1979–80), and she exhibits them in Bangkok at the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art.
Abad’s younger sister Victoria visits the couple and joins an NGO that provides medical aid to Cambodian refugees in camps along the Thai border.
1980
Abad and Garrity move to Sudan for another two-month assignment.
Abad and Garrity move to Boston for the next two years while Garrity pursues graduate studies in economics at Boston University. Abad produces her first prints and lithographs while working at the Art Institute of Boston.
Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., leader of the Philippine pro-democracy party Lakas ng Bayan, gains momentum and becomes Marcos’s most vocal critic. Aquino suffers a heart attack and seeks treatment in the United States, where he spends the next three years in exile near Boston. Abad meets with members of the Aquino family during this time.
Military forces under the command of Ferdinand Marcos assassinate Macli’ing Dulag, a leader of the Butbut peoples, known for his opposition to the Chico River Dam project in northern Luzon.
1981
Abad meets weekly with a group of women artists: Maria Fang, Barbara Newman, and Joanna Kao. With guidance from Newman, who made figurative soft sculptures, puppets, and dolls, Abad experiments with stitching and stuffing her two-dimensional works, resulting in a novel technique she calls “trapunto.”
Abad creates her first trapunto painting, African Mephisto, which begins her Masks and Spirits series. The figure’s dress is inspired by woven baskets she collected in Omdurman, Sudan.
Abad receives a three-month artist residency at Altos de Chavón in the Dominican Republic and exhibits portraits of working people in the exhibition Streets of Santo Domingo. She travels to Haiti and is influenced by Afro-Caribbean textile traditions, particularly the sequined Drapo Vodou (voodoo flag).
1982
After a twelve-year absence, Abad returns to Manila for the next four years while Garrity works for the Asian Development Bank, overseeing projects in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and South Korea.
After traveling through the highlands of Papua New Guinea, Abad begins a series of trapunto paintings inspired by the peoples of Goroka, Lae, Mount Hagen, and Madang. She integrates her trapunto paintings with locally sourced cowrie shells, bones, and feathers. In Indonesia, she learns about traditional shadow puppets, or wayang, which will become a major motif in her paintings.
1983
Marcos government conspirators assassinate Benigno Aquino on the tarmac of Manila International Airport. Enraged, Abad retreats to her Manila studio and paints Death of Ninoy, where it hangs during her time in the Philippines.
1984
Abad opens her first major solo show, Pacita Abad: A Philippine Painter Looks at the World, curated by Arturo Luz at the Museum of Philippine Art (MOPA), Manila. It includes over 120 works inspired by her travels to Bangladesh, Cambodia, Sudan, Thailand, and the Philippines.
Abad and Garrity travel to New York and see the exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art. The two question the exhibition’s Eurocentric bias and ethnographic view of non-Western artists.
Abad hosts Austrian painter Friedensreich Hundertwasser, a survivor of Nazi Germany, at her studio during his visit to Manila. Abad and Hundertwasser find that they share interests in animism, environmentalism, and the plight of war refugees.
On a layover during a flight from Manila to San Francisco, immigration officials apprehend Abad in Hawaii and detain her in Oakland, California. US authorities release her the next day after determining they have falsely accused her of possessing a fake green card.
1985
Abad receives the Ten Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) of the Philippines award. She controversially becomes the first woman in TOYM’s twenty-six-year history to receive the honor.
Abad shows ten of her “political expressions” paintings, including Death of Ninoy, at Pinaglabanan Galleries, in Manila. She meets Philippine artists Santiago Bose, BenCab (Benedicto Reyes Cabrera), Impy Pilapil, Gus Albor, Fernando Modesto, Nestor Vinluan, Filimon “Fil” Delacruz, Manuel Baldemor, Jerry Araos, Phyllis Zaballero, Paz Abad Santos, and Agnes Arellano, among others.
Abad travels with Garrity to Seoul and learns sumukhwa, or ink brush painting, a traditional style noted for its subtle, monochromatic palette and nature symbolism. Her trip leads to a series of abstract trapunto paintings based on repeated rice stalk patterns.
While joining Garrity in Sri Lanka, Abad starts the seventeen-foot-high trapunto painting Marcos and His Cronies, based on a Sinhalese exorcism mask of the demon Maha Kola. It will take her ten years to complete the work. Surrounded by eighteen masked figures representing various corrupt cabinet members, Marcos is depicted devouring the Philippine people. The mask representing his wife, Imelda, is studded with costume jewelry.
Her solo exhibition Pacita Abad: Paintings of People and Landscapes of Batanes, curated by Ray Albano, opens at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP).
1986
Abad returns to Washington, DC, with Garrity, who starts working for the World Bank.
Along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) in Manila, over two million citizens hold three days of nonviolent demonstrations against electoral fraud and decades of state brutality. The People Power Revolution, or EDSA Revolution, succeeds in removing Marcos and his supporters from Malacañang Palace. The Marcos family flees to Hawaii. Ninoy Aquino’s widow, Corazon Aquino, becomes the eleventh president of the Philippines.
Abad returns to Manila and shows Assaulting the Deep Sea, an immersive installation at the Ayala Museum, in Makati, Philippines, that features large-scale trapunto paintings of underwater scenes inspired by her more than eighty dives among many of the Philippine islands.
Abad exhibits at the 2nd Havana Biennial, which brings together the work of nearly seven hundred artists from fifty-six countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. There, she meets artists Leon Golub, Juan Sanchez, Marina Gutierrez, Josely Carvalho, May Stevens, and the Guerrilla Girls, as well as critic Lucy Lippard.
With Filipino Americans Anita Marina, Leonor (Noree) Aureus Briscoe, and Jon Melegrito, Abad founds the Philippine Arts, Letters, and Media Council (PALM) in Washington, DC.
1987
Abad travels to Mexico and sees the works of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, Francisco Zuniga, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, and Frida Kahlo—artists known for their national populist styles that integrate regionalist visual traditions.
Abad participates in the International Art Show for the End of World Hunger, a four-year traveling exhibition that goes to museums in eighteen countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
Abad befriends neighbor Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998), an artist who blends Indigenous African and Caribbean imagery into her textiles, paintings, and designs. The two artists share stories of their travels in France, Africa, and Haiti.
1988
In conjunction with the 1988 Summer Olympics held in Seoul, Abad is one of one hundred international painters invited to exhibit at the Olympiad of Art at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. She exhibits her trapunto painting Trapo. Abad teaches the classes Trapunto Painting: Canvas Collage and Art to Wear at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Abad meets fellow Filipino American artist Alfonso Ossorio at the Creeks, a mansion in East Hampton, New York, housing the artist’s studio and his massive and intricate assemblages of natural and industrial materials. Both Abad’s and Ossorio’s works incorporate objects from their global travels.
Abad creates costumes for the play Lola Ita’s Tales of Enchantment at the Apple Core Theater, New York.
1989
Abad participates in the 3rd Havana Biennial along with three hundred artists from forty-one countries.
1990
In New York, the New Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem open the exhibition The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s. It includes more than ninety-four artists who challenge notions of sexuality, race, gender, religion, and politics and reflect on how these issues have shaped what sociologist James Davidson Hunter would soon call the “culture wars.”
Abad wins the Metro Art Award and installs a fifty-foot mural entitled Masks from Six Continents at the Metro Center subway station in Washington, DC, which remains on public display for three years.
Abad receives the first of three artist residencies at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, during which she creates lithographs, woodcuts, and pulp-paper works. She produces the lithographs African Mephisto, If My Friends Could See Me Now, and Filipina: A Racial Identity Crisis with Eileen Foti.
Abad travels to the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Jordan and experiments with sand paintings.
1991
Abad’s mother passes away. A lifelong inspiration to the artist, Aurora Abad ran their household of twelve children and at times housed and fed fifty other students; she represented Batanes as both congresswoman and governor.
Abad receives two artist-in-residence fellowships at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville, Maryland, where she creates prints and paper-pulp collages. She produces a large-scale woodblock print with Helen Frederick.
Abad becomes a member of the board of directors for the Alternative Museum, in New York; Cultural Alliance of Greater Washington, in Washington, DC; and Arlington Arts Center, in Virginia.
Abad travels to Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and South Africa and works on small, handmade-paper collages, paints on bark, and learns how to make mud-cloth textiles.
After learning of the detention of tens of thousands of Central American men, women, and children fleeing violence at the US southern border, she paints Caught at the Border.
1992
A jury acquits the four police officers who beat motorist Rodney King, sparking violent conflicts between Black, Latinx, and Korean American communities in what has become known as the Los Angeles Riots. One year later, Abad creates the work Korean Shopkeepers.
Abad creates costumes for the Pacific Bridge Theater Company play Long after Love, performed at the Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
The Kennebunkport Order forcibly repatriates thousands of refugees to war-torn Haiti. Abad begins her trapunto painting Haitians Waiting at Guantanamo Bay.
Abad produces the work L.A. Liberty, depicting the likeness of the Statue of Liberty as a brown-skinned woman. During a visit to Ellis Island in New York, she recognizes that the more than one million immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America—many of whom first landed at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay—have been excluded from the story of American immigration.
1993
Along with artists Hung Liu, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Howardena Pindell, and Joyce J. Scott, Abad participates in the group exhibition Women’s Spirit at Bomani Gallery, San Francisco. The exhibition will become notable for presenting work by five women artists of color who would each receive critical attention decades later.
Abad takes part in the group exhibition Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, curated by Margo Machida and organized by the Asia Society Galleries in New York. Exploring how politics and history shape selfhood, the exhibition features twenty artists including Marlon Fuentes, Manuel Ocampo, Zarina, Tseng Kwong Chi, and others. Its extensive tour includes the Tacoma Art Museum, in Washington; Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis; Honolulu Academy of Arts, in Hawaii; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco; MIT List Visual Arts Center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Blaffer Gallery, at the University of Houston, Texas.
Abad participates in the group exhibition Beyond the Borders: Art by Recent Immigrants, curated by Betti-Sue Hertz, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. The exhibition showcases the impact of immigrants on American culture and features works by thirty artists, including Shirin Neshat, Mo Bahc, Dinh Le, and Allan deSouza.
Abad participates in the group exhibition Touch: Beyond the Visual, curated by Angela Adams and Paula Owen. Organized by the Hand Workshop, Richmond, Virginia, the exhibition features works by twenty artists, including Joyce J. Scott, John McQueen, and Renée Stout, who use unconventional materials to explore multisensory experience and illusion.
Abad conducts painting workshops for elderly Alzheimer’s patients in Maryland nursing homes. She gives workshops on trapunto painting at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond, and at art centers throughout the state.
Abad moves to Jakarta, Indonesia, where Garrity starts working for the Indonesian conglomerate Gajah Tunggal Group.
1994
Abad travels throughout Indonesia and continues working on her series based on traditional Indonesian wayang puppetry, incorporating batik and ikat elements. She researches the Ramayana and Mahabharata in Indonesia and spends time with the puppet masters (dalang) Tizar Purbaya, in Jakarta, and Ki Sigit Sukasman, in Yogyakarta. Over the next fifteen years, she will create more than one hundred wayang paintings. Later, in 2000, James de Rave of Kedaung Ceramics commissions Abad to hand paint a limited-edition, 144-piece dinnerware set based on her paintings of wayang kulit.
Abad is officially naturalized as a US citizen and is sworn in at the Washington Monument.
The artist is featured in a CBS television documentary called Pacita Abad: Wild at Art, directed by Kavery Kaul and produced by Asian Women United, in San Francisco, an organization founded in 1976 that seeks to represent Asian American women’s experiences through writing and film.
Abad receives a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and begins work on her series Immigrant Experience. She later presents these paintings in a solo exhibition titled Pacita Abad: Artists + Community, curated by Angela Adams, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington, DC.
1995
With artist Paz Abad Santos, Abad holds a joint exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila entitled Thinking Big, showing a selection of trapunto paintings across her career, including works from the Abstractions, Immigrant Experience, and Masks and Spirits series. Curated by Cora Alvina, the exhibition includes Marcos and His Cronies (1985–95).
Flor Contemplacion, an overseas Filipina worker (OFW), is sentenced to death in Singapore after unsupported charges of murder. This case sheds light on the abuses of Filipinx domestic workers abroad. Abad creates the trapunto painting Contemplating Flor. Hong Kong has a large community of OFWs who live in poverty and face daily discrimination. Frustrated by their lack of political representation and government support, Abad creates Filipinas in Hong Kong.
Abad receives an Excellence 2000 Award for the Arts given by the US Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce, Washington, DC.
1996
Abad participates in Memories of Overdevelopment: Philippine Diaspora in Contemporary Art, at the University Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine. Curated by Pamela Bailey, Cirilo Domine, Vicente Golveo, Catherine Lord, and Yong Soon Min, the exhibition takes place one hundred years after the Philippine Revolution against Spain and after fifty years of independence from the United States.
The artist is selected to participate in the US State Department’s Art in Embassies program. US embassies in Asia and Africa hang six of Abad’s trapunto paintings, including those from her Immigrant Experience and Asian Abstractions series.
1997
Abad travels through Java, Sumatra, Sumba, and Sulawesi, gathering materials for her batik and ikat paintings. She participates in the World Batik Exhibition in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, demonstrating the deep influence of batik on her artistic practice.
1998
Indonesia’s President Suharto resigns following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which leads to the extreme devaluation of the rupiah. As mass riots break out in Jakarta, Abad sketches the makeshift barricades and the city's burned-down Chinese shops and banks. Over six months, Abad creates the monumental abstract trapunto painting The Sky Is Falling, the Sky Is Falling.
Abad participates in Bayan, a centennial celebration of Philippine independence at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, curated by Cora Alvina, where she shows 100 Years of Freedom: From Batanes to Jolo. The large-scale artwork incorporates textile fragments from every province of the Philippines.
Abad participates in the group exhibition At Home and Abroad: 20 Contemporary Filipino Artists, which opens at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and travels to the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. The exhibition explores the complexities of heritage and race embodied by Philippine identity and includes work by artists Santiago Bose, Paul Pfeiffer, Stephanie Syjuco, Lani Maestro, and Dindo Llana, among others.
1999
Abad creates costumes for the play Luna: Comic Drama and Art to Wear, produced by Gilda Cordero Fernando and directed by Manny Chaves at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
2000
Abad spends three months in Rajasthan, India, where she is inspired by its textile, culinary, and garment traditions. She begins a group of works that incorporates beads, mirrors, buttons, tin, and elaborate embroidery in a group of works that she calls The Sky Is the Limit.
Abad receives the Pamana ng Pilipino Award in Manila for outstanding achievement in the arts.
Abad moves to Singapore after seven years in Jakarta.
2001
Abad visits Myanmar for six weeks and makes work inspired by the country’s architecture, peoples, and culture.
Abad and Garrity start building a new studio and home in Batanes, situated on a cliff overlooking the West Philippine Sea. The building’s thick limestone and coral-colored walls incorporate elements of traditional Ivatan architecture. The couple call their new home Fundacion Pacita.
Abad becomes an artist-in-residence at Lindshammar Glassworks, Sweden, where she learns to paint glass.
On the way to Texas to start her residency at the Southwest School of Art and Craft in San Antonio, Abad stops in New York to visit Ground Zero two weeks after the September 11 attacks. She creates three commemorative murals as part of the 9/11 Phoenix Project in collaboration with thirty local women artists.
Abad goes to Washington, DC, where she learns that she has advanced lung cancer.
2002
Abad returns to Singapore and undergoes chemotherapy and radiotherapy. While undergoing the treatments, she begins the last of her large-scale trapunto paintings, called the Endless Blues series. Abad exhibits these works in a solo exhibition entitled The Sky Is the Limit at the Esplanade in Singapore.
2003
Kenneth Tyler, a key figure in postwar American printmaking, opens the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI). Abad is one of the first artists selected for a three-month residency. She creates Circles in My Mind, a series of fifty-six mixed-media paper works incorporating lithography, relief, screenprinting, and hand-colored paper pulp.
While at STPI, she conceives of the idea to paint the nearby 180-foot-long Alkaff Bridge spanning the Singapore River. The Singapore government approves her proposal at the end of
the year.
2004
While undergoing radiotherapy treatment, Abad works with a team to paint the once-gray Alkaff Bridge. Inaugurated on January 29, the bridge—now known as the Singapore ArtBridge—includes fifty-five colors and 2,350 painted circles.
Abad travels to the Philippines in September to open her final exhibition, Circles in My Mind, at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, surrounded by family and friends.
Abad returns to Batanes to finish her last paintings at Fundacion Pacita. She returns to Singapore due to her rapidly deteriorating health.
On December 7, Pacita Abad passes away in Singapore after a three-year battle with cancer.
Through Fundacion Pacita, Abad’s family helps promote the growing and vibrant community of artists in Batanes to this day.
Compiled by Matthew Villar Miranda, in consultation with the Pacita Abad Art Estate, from archival materials, published interviews, and firsthand conversations with the artist’s collaborators, friends, and family.
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