Pactia Abad: Philippine Painter
Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines
28 November 2024 – 30 March 2025
Pacita Abad, Her Dress Inside, 2000 © Pacita Abad Art Estate
This exhibition, curated by Clarissa Chikiamco and located in the museum’s north gallary, celebrates the late artist Pacita Abad as a Philippine painter. Born in Batanes, the Philippines’ northernmost province, Abad left the country in 1970, resided in 14 cities, and travelled to over 60 countries, living a peripatetic life. She acknowledged the important influence travel had on her work yet also remarked in an interview in 1985, ‘But I’d rather be known as a Filipino painter, wherever I am.’ While she eventually became a US citizen in 1994, Abad retained her dual citizenship and repeatedly referred to her background in the Philippines as a source of her work, attributing it to her love for nature and people as subjects of her art.
At the core of Abad artistic practice is painting which she explored since her turn to the visual arts in the mid-1970s. Forgoing a scholarship to attend law school at the University of California, Berkeley, Abad pivoted to art, becoming enamoured of painting. She exclaimed to a reporter in 1979, ‘I just want to paint, paint, paint!’
This exhibition focuses on the first ten years of Abad’s practice, from 1976, the year she began her formal art studies at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., to 1986, the last year she was based in Manila after returning to the Philippines in 1982. Drawing entirely from local collections, the show traces Pacita’s growing confidence and motivations as a Philippine painter active at home and overseas.