Overlooked During Her Lifetime, Filipino-American Artist Pacita Abad Has Suddenly Become a Global Star

Abad’s signature format was trapunto, a style of large-scale quilt. Despite the playfulness of their textures and coloring, Abad’s versions often tackled dense, complicated intersectionalities, from her identity as an immigrant Ivatan woman in the Western world to the social and political tensions of the authoritarian Marcos regime in the Philippines.

“What Pacita was doing, if you paid attention to it and got into it,” says Katrib, “was actually very advanced and very sophisticated, and very apropos to now—the politics, everything.”

Pio remembers the first time his aunt showed Marcos and His Cronies, a massive mixed-media painting on display in the PS1 show, in Manila. Upon seeing the work, President Fidel V. Ramos, a former Marcos loyalist whom Abad was guiding in a tour, cracked: “So, Pacita, which one am I?”

Pio delights in the memory of that story. “In her work she’s presenting you with an inconvenient truth in such a vibrant, beautiful way, where it becomes like a sequined velvet hammer,” he says. “She nudges you towards that truth. You always have to, I think, seduce people towards self-awareness, or their lack thereof.” (It’s a lesson he seems to have internalized: Within his own practice, Pio has tackled similarly thorny political issues in a visually enchanting way.)

Art market success largely eluded Abad while she was working. “There was one period where she wasn’t selling much, and somebody said, ‘Your paintings are too big,’” Garrity says. “So she actually cut up about two or three of her big paintings into smaller paintings, and they sold, but it was painful.” At another point, he says, after showing some 130 paintings in an exhibition, she only made about 30 sales.

All the same, she never gave up hope of one day showing in major museums. “She wanted lots of people to see her work,” Garrity says. “That’s one of the reasons I think that she painted so big—because they were meant for institutions.”