Pacita exemplified her unique approach to composition in mixed media, painted textile collages, abstract assemblages and trapunto paintings – padded, quilted, and adorned with sequins, beads, shells, buttons, bits of mirror, tin and glass, rickrack, rhinestones and swatches of hand-stitched textiles such as Indonesian ikat and batik gathered from her travels. Her works cover socio-political portraits, masks and her love of underwater scenery, animal wildlife and tropical flowers, while her public arts include the 55-meter long bridge in Singapore, wherein she painted 2,350 multicolored circles a few months before she passed on in 2004.
The Pacita Abad: A Million Things to Say catalogue invites the readers into a discussion about her body of work, particularly her underwater trapunto paintings, as well as the production and exhibition history of her Masks and Spirits series. It likewise delves on Pacita’s place in the history of art as well as the complexity of being a ‘woman of colour’ — a double entendre that she herself embraced.
The book features a conversation between the exhibition curators together with Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, a curator of National Art Gallery Singapore. It also includes essays by Clara Kim, the Daskalopoulos senior curator for International Art at Tate Modern London, as well as H.G. Masters, the deputy editor and deputy publisher of Art Asia Pacific Magazine Singapore.
The book was designed by Studio HATO and was printed by Asia One HK. It comes with a softcover and a dust jacket.
About the Artist
Pacita Barsana Abad was an Ivatan and Philippine- American painter. She was born in Basco, Batanes, a small island in the northernmost part of the Philippines, between Luzon and Taiwan. Her more than 30- year painting career began when she traveled to the United States to undertake graduate studies.
About the Contributors
Pio Abad (b. 1983, Manila) is a Filipino artist living and working in London. His work is concerned with the social and political signification of things. Deeply informed by the modern history of the Philippines, where the artist was born and raised, his work uses strategies of appropriation to mine alternative or repressed historical events, unravel official accounts and draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies and people.
Joselina Cruz is the director and curator of the Museum oc Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), De La Salle- College of Saint Benilde, Manila. Cruz worked as a curator for the Lopez Memorial Museum in Manila and the Singapore Art Museum. She was a curator for the 2nd Singapore Biennale (2008) , a networking curator for the 13th Jakarta Biennale (2009), and curator of the Philippine Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017)
About the Publisher
The Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) is a not-for-profit institution that continues to be the external face of De La Salle – College of Saint Benilde.
