28 Facts About Pacita Abad

Pacita Barsana Abad was a Filipino-born American Ivatan self-taught visual artist.

Pacita Abad exhibited her work in over 200 museums, galleries and other venues, including 75 solo shows, around the world.

Pacita Barsana Abad was born in Basco, Batanes, on October 5,1946.

Pacita Abad was the fifth of thirteen children between Aurora Barsana and Jorge Abad.

From 1949 to 1972, her father, Jorge Pacita Abad, represented the lone district of Batanes for a total of five nonconsecutive terms in the Congress of the Philippines.

The Pacita Abad family moved from Batanes to Manila at the end of Jorge's first term.

In Manila, Pacita Abad attended Legarda Elementary School and Ramon Magsaysay High School.

Pacita Abad graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman with a Bachelor of Arts in political science in 1968.

However, Pacita Abad deferred her enrollment after meeting Stanford graduate student Jack Garrity.

The couple later moved to Washington DC and then to New York City, where Pacita Abad took up formal painting classes at the Corcoran School of Art and the Art Students League of New York, respectively.

At the Art Students League, Pacita Abad concentrated on still life, and figurative painting under John Heliker and Robert Beverly Hale.

In 1971, after Pacita Abad first moved to San Francisco, she met and married artist George Kleiman.

In 1973, while at a regional World Affairs Conference in Monterey, California, Pacita Abad met Jack Garrity, a graduate student at Stanford studying international finance.

Pacita Abad was naturalized as a citizen of the United States in 1994.

From 1978 to 1980, Pacita Abad traveled with Garrity as his work brought them to Bangladesh, Sudan, and Thailand.

Towards the end of 1979, Pacita Abad was painting from the material she gathered and, by April 1980, she exhibited the 24-painting-series Portraits of Kampuchea, known as the Cambodian Refugee series, at the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art in Bangkok.

From 1980 to 1982, Pacita Abad lived in Boston while Garrity took up a two-year graduate program at Boston University.

Pacita Abad started her Masks and Spirits series in 1981 with her first trapunto painting.

Pacita Abad painted a 55-meter long Alkaff Bridge in Singapore and covered it with 2,350 multicolored circles, just a few months before she died.

Pacita Abad developed a technique of trapunto painting, which entailed stitching and stuffing her painted canvases to give them a three-dimensional, sculptural effect.

Pacita Abad then began incorporating into the surface of her paintings materials such as traditional cloth, mirrors, beads, shells, plastic buttons and other objects.

Pacita Abad had received numerous awards during her artistic career in which her most memorable award was her first.

Pacita Abad had received the Ten Outstanding Young Men of the Philippines award in the Arts in 1984, an award that has always been given to men for the last 25 years until in 1984 where Pacita Abad became the first woman ever to receive this prestigious award.

In Pacita Abad receiving this award, it had created a public uproar where angry letters sent to editors of published newspapers from men and male artists who thought that they, not Pacita Abad, should have received the award.

Pacita Abad is buried in Batanes, next to her vacation home-and-studio Fundacion Pacita.

Pacita Abad's works have been displayed in galleries and museums in the Philippines during the annual Philippine Arts Month and art festivals.

Pacita Abad's works were exhibited in Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and at the 60th Venice Biennale, among others.

On July 31,2020, Pacita Abad was commemorated with a Google Doodle.