Pacita Abad

Biography

In 2004 the Alkaff Bridge in Singapore, a footbridge fifty-five metres long, was covered with 2,350 circles in fifty-five colours. It is the last large work of Pacita Abad, finished a few months before her death. The bridge has been known ever since as the Singapore ArtBridge.

It all began a long way from painting. Abad was born on 5 October 1946 in Basco, in the Batanes islands, the northernmost in the Philippines, the fifth of thirteen children. Her father, Jorge Abad, represented Batanes in the country’s Congress, with interruptions, from 1949 to 1972; her mother, Aurora, held the same seat for one term in the second half of the 1960s. The family moved to Manila, where Pacita finished school, took a bachelor’s degree in political science at the University of the Philippines in 1968 and the following year began to study law. At the same time she was organising student demonstrations against the way the 1969 elections were being run, and with her fellow students she was received by President Marcos; the newspapers reported it. After the turbulent elections her parents advised her to continue her studies in Spain. In 1970, on the way to Madrid, she called on an aunt in San Francisco and stayed in the United States.

There she worked as a secretary for a foreign-aid foundation, sewed at home and studied at Lone Mountain College, where in 1973 she defended a master’s thesis in Asian history: on the part played by Emilio Aguinaldo in the passing of the Philippines from Spain to the United States in 1898. She was given a scholarship to the law school at Berkeley. She deferred her enrolment, spent a year travelling across Asia with Jack Garrity, a Stanford graduate student who became her husband, and on returning to California gave up the scholarship and took up paints. Until then she had been self-taught; later, in New York and Washington, she attended classes at the Art Students League, where still life and the figure were taught by John Heliker and Robert Beverly Hale, and at the Corcoran School of Art.

Garrity’s work as a development economist took them in 1978–1980 to Bangladesh, Sudan and Thailand. In Thailand Abad went to the refugee camps on the Cambodian border, helped with relief work, made sketches and took photographs; by April 1980 this material had grown into a series of twenty-four paintings, “Portraits of Kampuchea”, shown at the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art in Bangkok. “Flight to Freedom” (1980), one of her best-known works, was not yet ready for the opening.

Then came two years in Boston. In a weekly circle of women artists at the Art Institute of Boston, with the help of the fabric artist Barbara Newman, Abad worked out her own technique: trapunto, named after the quilting method. The canvas is quilted, stuffed from behind and painted over, so that the picture acquires volume, almost relief; in time mirrors, beads, shells, plastic buttons and pieces of cloth entered the surface. In 1981 she painted “African Mephisto”, the first work in the “Masks and Spirits” series. From 1982 the family lived in Manila, where she had two large solo exhibitions: “A Philippine Painter Looks at the World” (1984, curated by Arturo Luz) and “Paintings of People and Landscapes of Batanes” (1985, Cultural Center of the Philippines). In 1984 she became the first woman to receive the Philippine Ten Outstanding Young Men award for the arts; she later called it the prize she remembered best. The same years produced “Death of Ninoy” (1983), painted immediately after the assassination of Benigno Aquino, and the trapunto “Marcos and His Cronies”, on which she worked until 1995.

In 1986 Garrity moved to the World Bank, and for seven years Washington was her base. Abad was a co-founder of the Philippine Arts, Letters, and Media Council, in 1988 taught classes in trapunto and wearable art at the Smithsonian Institution, and from 1990 to 1993 her six trapuntos “Masks from Six Continents” hung as a mural at the Metro Center station. There were residencies at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (three, beginning in 1990) and at Pyramid Atlantic (1991), the Washington Metro Art Award (1990), a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (1994), out of which grew the “Immigrant Experience” series, and a solo exhibition, “Artists + Community”, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (1994–1995). In 1996 six of her trapuntos were hung in United States embassies in Africa and Asia. The canvases of those years answer the news: “Caught at the Border” (1991), “Korean Shopkeepers” and “L.A. Liberty” (1992) after the Los Angeles riots, “Contemplating Flor” (1995) after the sentencing of the Filipina Flor Contemplacion in Singapore, “Filipinas in Hong Kong” (1995). The 1991 self-portrait “If My Friends Could See Me Now” seems to me the truest picture of her: a red beret, the Transamerica Pyramid royal blue behind her, scarlet and violet houses, and Lombard Street embroidered in gold thread.

From 1993 they lived in Jakarta, from 2000 in Singapore. Indonesian wayang puppets yielded a series of more than a hundred paintings and, in 2000, a commission for a hand-painted dinner service from Kedaung Ceramics. In 2001 a studio and house, Fundacion Pacita, were built on a clifftop in Batanes; the same year brought residencies at the Lindshammar glassworks in Sweden and at the Southwest School of Art and Craft in San Antonio, and in 2003 she was among the first to receive a residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute. Her last series of large trapuntos, “Endless Blues”, was made and shown in Singapore in 2002. In all she left more than four thousand works: early figurative pieces about people and masks, large paintings of the underwater world, tropical flowers and animals, and the most extensive body of all, colour abstraction on canvas, paper, barkcloth, metal, ceramic and glass.

Abad died on 7 December 2004 in Singapore. She is buried in Batanes, next to her studio. In 2014 a life-size bronze statue of her was put up at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, in 2019 Tate Modern showed two of her quilted works, “Bacongo III–IV” (1986) and “European Mask” (1990), and in 2023 the first major retrospective opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and then travelled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1 and the Art Gallery of Ontario.