Pacita Abad

Pacita Barsana Abad (October 5, 1946 – December 7, 2004) was an Ivatan and Filipino-American artist.

Her more than 30-year painting career began when she traveled to the United States to undertake graduate studies in Spain.

She exhibited her work in over 200 museums, galleries and other venues, including 75 solo shows, around the world.

Abad's work is now in public, corporate and private art collections in over 70 countries.

Pacita Barsana Abad was born in Basco, Batanes, on October 5, 1946, the fifth of thirteen children.

She was the daughter of Aurora Barsana and Jorge Abad.

From 1949 to 1972, her father, Jorge Abad, represented the lone district of Batanes for a total of five nonconsecutive terms in the Congress of the Philippines.

Her mother, Aurora Abad, served for one term (1966 to 1969) in the same elected position as her husband after he was appointed secretary of public works and highways by President Diosdado Macapagal.

The Abad family moved from Batanes to Manila at the end of Jorge's first term.

In Manila, Abad attended Legarda Elementary School and Ramon Magsaysay High School.

She graduated from the University of the Philippines Diliman with a bachelor of arts in political science in 1968.

The following year, she began graduate law studies at the same institution.

During that time, she also began organizing student demonstrations protesting brutal tactics employed in the 1969 general election, including those used in Batanes, where her father was running for another term.

Following a demonstration near Malacañang, Abad and several of her fellow student demonstrators met with President Ferdinand Marcos, drawing national media attention to their protest.

The Abad family home in Manila soon became a target of violence and was gunned one evening.

Although nobody was harmed, following the incident, Abad was encouraged by her parents to leave the country and continue her law studies in Spain.

In 1970, on the way to Europe, she visited an aunt in San Francisco and decided to stay in the United States instead.

While supporting herself with two jobs, working as a secretary during the day and as a seamstress at night, Abad took up a graduate program in Asian history at Lone Mountain College.

In 1971, after Abad first moved to San Francisco, she met and married artist George Kleinmen.

They separated shortly after.

In 1973 she completed a doctoral dissertation on The role of Emilio Aguinaldo in the acquisition of the Philippines by the United States from Spain: 1898.

After receiving her masters in 1973, she was offered a scholarship to attend the Boalt Law School at the University of California, Berkeley.

However, Abad deferred her enrollment after meeting Stanford graduate student Jack Garrity.

The two traveled across Asia for a year, including a two-month stay in the Philippines.

Upon returning to California, Abad relinquished her law school scholarship and took up painting.

The couple later moved to Washington D.C. and then to New York City, where Abad took up formal painting classes at the Corcoran School of Art and the Art Students League of New York, respectively.

At the Art Students League, Abad concentrated on still life, and figurative painting under John Heliker and Robert Beverly Hale.

In 1973, while at a regional World Affairs Conference in Monterey, California, Abad met Jack Garrity, a graduate student at Stanford studying international finance.

The two decided to travel across Asia for a year together.

They remained together upon returning to the United States.

Later on, Garrity's work as a development economist brought the couple to live and travel to over 60 countries.

From 1978 to 1980, Abad traveled with Garrity as his work brought them to Bangladesh, Sudan, and Thailand.

During this time, Abad traveled the region, learning about Indigenous art techniques and traditions, as well as encountering refugee camps, the experiences later informing her work as an artist.

In Thailand, her attention was drawn to the refugee crisis along the Thai-Cambodian border following the outbreak of the Cambodian-Vietnamese War.

During several trips to the refugee camps at the border assisting in relief work, she spent time with the refugees, journalists, and relief administrators, and began to draw sketches and take photographs.

Towards the end of 1979, Abad was painting from the material she gathered and, by April 1980, she exhibited the 24-painting-series Portraits of Kampuchea, also known as the Cambodian Refugee series, at the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art in Bangkok.

From 1980 to 1982, Abad lived in Boston while Garrity took up a two-year graduate program at Boston University.

She started her Masks and Spirits series in 1981 with her first tarpunto painting.

In 1982, the couple moved to Manila, where Garrity worked for the Asian Development Bank.

Abad was naturalized as a citizen of the United States in 1994.