Pacita Abad: The First Retrospective of Pacita Abad's Paintings, co-curated by Victoria Sung, Eungie Joo and Nancy Lim, at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Floor 4

SFMOMA: The first retrospective of Pacita Abad (born 1946, Batanes, Philippines; died 2004, Singapore) features over 40 dazzling works that showcase the artist’s experiments in different mediums, including painting, sculpture, textiles, and works on paper. Abad is best known for her trapuntos, a form of quilted painting made by stitching and stuffing her canvases as opposed to stretching them over a wood frame. Over a 32-year career, the prolific artist made a vast number of artworks that traverse a diversity of subjects, from colorful masks to intricately constructed underwater scenes to abstract compositions.

Though she became a U.S. citizen in 1994, Abad spent time in 60 countries, including Sudan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, with longer stays in the United States, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore. Through her travels, she interacted with myriad artistic communities, incorporating diverse cultural traditions — from Korean ink brush painting to Indonesian batik — into her expansive practice. Abad’s global, peripatetic existence is reflected in the portability of her works and in her use of textiles, a medium often associated with female labor and historically marginalized as craft. Her bold, colorful pieces are deeply personal expressions of her lived experience, and the exhibition celebrates the work of an artist whose vibrant visual, material, and conceptual concerns are as urgent today as they were three decades ago.

Pacita Abad (on view October 21, 2023–January 28, 2024, Floor 4) features over 40 dazzling works that showcase the artist’s experiments in different mediums, including painting, sculpture, textiles, and works on paper.

Exhibition Tour

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