Overlooked During Her Lifetime, Filipino American Artist Pacita Abad Has Suddenly Become a Global Star
Raymond Ang, Vogue
April 2024
It’s easy to see why Pacita Abad’s work resonated with Faith Ringgold. Like her American counterpart, Abad—a native of Basco, Batanes, in the Philippines—was both an expressive painter and a master of the narrative quilt, embracing and elevating a medium long dismissed for its folksy domesticity. Also, decades before the globalization of the art world in the 1990s, Abad was already creating work that referenced multiculturalism and immigration; her L.A Liberty,
like Ringgold’s American Collection #1: We Came to America, riffs on the iconography of the Statue of Liberty, reclaiming the Mother of Exiles from American narratives that tend to exclude nonwhite people. (“An international woman of color” is how Ringgold described Abad in the 2003 compendiumFresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art.) […]