Pacita Abad

Pacita Abad (1946–2004) was a Filipino-American artist known for vibrant paintings and large-scale trapunto works. She stitched and stuffed painted canvases to create richly patterned, three-dimensional surfaces.

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Trapunto: A quilting technique that stuffs raised areas between fabric layers to create a padded, sculptural surface. Abad adapted this technique to build raised, stitched surfaces on painted canvases.
Canvas: A durable woven fabric used as a support for painting. Abad painted on canvas before stitching and padding it.
Batanes: An island province in the northernmost part of the Philippines. Abad was born in Basco, the provincial capital of Batanes.
Immigration: The movement of people into a country where they intend to live. Abad’s experience as an immigrant informs themes of movement and belonging.
La California: A Partition: A 1990 Pacita Abad work addressing the partition of India and Pakistan. Its layered, vivid surface shows how Abad joined textile craft to historical subject matter.
Quilting: The craft of joining layers of fabric with stitches, often to make a padded textile. Quilting supplies the layered structure behind Abad’s trapunto paintings.
Acrylic paint: A fast-drying paint made with pigment suspended in an acrylic polymer emulsion. Its vivid color suited the bold surfaces Abad created on fabric.
Philippines: An archipelago in Southeast Asia comprising thousands of islands. Abad’s Filipino identity and early life shaped the contexts of her work.
Social realism: Art that depicts social conditions and ordinary life, often with critical attention to inequality. Her paintings address poverty, displacement, and the lives of marginalized people.
Masks and Spirits: A series of Pacita Abad works drawing on mask forms and spiritual imagery. The series demonstrates her transformation of mask-inspired imagery into dimensional surfaces.