CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/9/2024

Pacita Abad “thrills” at MoMA PS1

Don't miss Pacita Abad—on view at MoMA PS1 through September 2 and a “thrilling” recent critic's pick in the New York Times. Spreads here are from the Walker Art Center's superbly-designed, first-ever retrospective catalog on the exuberant, internationally itinerant Filipino textile-plus artist. “Textiles, for Abad, were more than a material consideration,” Walker curator Victoria Sung writes. “They constituted a theoretical modality—one that incorporated feminist, transnational and decolonial strategies—in their maker’s insistence on fabric as painting, stitching as labor and ornamentation as objective. Just as the Congolese sapeurs (and present-day sapeuses, as the women are known) mixed and matched different articles of European clothing into defiantly bold yet elegant ensembles, Abad created her own compositional aesthetic using the technique of trapunto (from the Italian word trapungere meaning “to embroider”). Abad described trapunto in straightforward terms: ‘I paint, using either oil or acrylic, on canvas and then collage. This top layer carries the design. To this I add a backing cloth and stuff polyester filling in between. The two layers are then joined with running stitches.’ Yet, the medium was far from straightforward. … Abad practiced a defiant form of bricolage that art historian Patrick Flores has described, tongue in cheek, as the work of a ‘flaneur bricoleur.’”