Pacita Abad: Philippine Painter: Metropolitan Museum of Manila

This exhibition celebrates the late artist Pacita Abad (1946-2004) as a Philippine painter. Born in Batanes, the Philippines’ northernmost province, Pacita left the country in 1970, resided in 14 cities, and traveled 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 United States citizen in 1994, Pacita 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 Pacita’s artistic practice is painting which she explored since her turn to the visual arts in the mid-1970s. Pacita graduated from political science at the University of the Philippines in 1969, intending to follow her parents’ political career. As tensions mounted in the Philippines leading to Martial Law, Pacita left the country to pursue her law degree abroad, landing in San Francisco. Forgoing a scholarship to attend law school at the University of California, Berkeley, Pacita pivoted to art, becoming enamored 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 Pacita’s artistic 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.