An itinerant artist who absorbed and synthesized traditions in quilted canvases with maximalist color and flair, Pacita Abad embodies the ethos of a straniero ovunque (foreigner everywhere) through her trapuntos.

Words Pio Angelo Ocampo
May 6, 2024

A year of rediscovery and commemoration for the extensive contributions of an innovative yet under-recognized figure, Pacita Abad (b. Philippines, 1946–2004) is celebrated in two major ways 20 years after her death. First, with a major retrospective in MoMA PS1 New York during the spring, covering the artist’s 32-year career with over 50 works—most of which has never been in public view in the United States, and second, with an invitation to the 60th iteration of the International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, titled Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

Abad developed her artistic language in her travels and itinerant way of living by collecting scraps of fabric, each representing the textile tradition of the places she visited: from Turkey to the Philippines, passing through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. From there, she decided to look homeward to explore her native country, traversing the mountainous regions of northern Luzon, known as the Cordilleras, to the Muslim regions of Marawi, Cotabato, and Zamboanga in Mindanao, absorbing the native textile traditions such as the T’boli t’nalak weave.

This understanding of the worldliness that her artistic practice carried from the beginning. Each scrap of fabric held a history of a people and their lands, imbued with generations of trade, conquest, and technology. She then embraces the trapunto method, a technique that utilizes at least two layers, an underside of which is slit and padded, producing a raised surface on the quilt. Although trapunto is an Italian quilting technique that predates the fourteenth century, Abad inverts this method by creating padded patterns on stitched cloth, rendering a sculptural dimension, and infusing it with imagery rooted in non-hegemonic cultures.

Filipinas in Hong Kong, 1995, acrylic on stitched and padded canvas. 269 x 300 cm. © Pacita Abad Art Estate.

View of Haitians Waiting at Guantanamo Bay (1994) and You Have To Blend In, Before You Stand Out (1995) at the 2024 Venice Biennale © CKJ

Aware of the influence that so-called “primitive” art had exerted on Western modernism and the art world’s bias against Indigenous art that was automatically labeled as “decorative” or “ethnographic” (even historically gendered “female” and inferior to the male dominated Western world), Abad unapologetically used her trapuntos in presenting herself and her oeuvre. The rarity of her success exposes the underlying issues of the contemporary art world she moved in where textiles are not considered as fine art, despite the long-standing tradition of textile production in the non Westernized world. In her presentation in this year’s Venice Biennale, three exemplary trapuntos from her Immigrant Experience series are showcased: Filipinas In Hong Kong (1995), Haitians Waiting at Guantanamo Bay (1994), and You Have To Blend In, Before You Stand Out (1995).

This is the spirit contained in the life and work of Pacita Abad: a flamboyance that challenged the status quo whether in her native Philippines or in the United States. Geared against Eurocentric views, Abad once playfully responded to Malaya newspaper, “I prefer the Third World. Give me Haiti over Paris anytime.” With the same contrarian exuberance in L.A. Liberty, the first in the aforementioned Immigrant Experience series, she portrays realities faced by migrants of color, creating diasporic visions in vivid colors that reach issues of immigration to this day, where curators such as Adriano Pedrosa heed to call the art of Pacita Abad to exemplify a foreigner that has lived, geographically and artistically, everywhere.

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