Pacita Abad, a Filipino artist who fled political persecution in 1970 and went on to create over 5,000 works, is finally receiving her first career retrospective. Organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the exhibition is now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), featuring roughly 40 pieces that showcase her vibrant trapunto paintings—quilted canvases embellished with materials like buttons, beads, and shells. The show will travel to MoMA PS1 in New York and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto next year.
This retrospective matters because it corrects a long-standing oversight in art history. Despite her prolific output and extensive exhibition history, Abad remained obscure due to her itinerant lifestyle and the racism and sexism that dismissed her work as ethnic or decorative. The exhibition highlights her engagement with issues of race, immigration, and feminism, and positions her as a significant figure in 20th-century art, offering a well-deserved breakthrough moment for an artist whose work is the opposite of Minimalism—wild, colorful, and materially rich.