About a year before she died of cancer, in 2004, at the age of 58, the artist Pacita Abad and a team painted a pedestrian bridge that crosses the Singapore River with exuberant colors and more than 2,000 circles. Surrounded by ho-hum hotels and apartment buildings, it radiates joy. Abad’s work is in museums throughout Asia, and in Manila, where she grew up, the National Museum’s holdings include a painfully lucid 1980 painting of two wary children, Cambodian refugees, holding each other.
However, in New York, where Abad lived briefly in the 1970s, while studying painting at the Art Students League, her work has been scarce. The Museum of Modern Art owns nothing by her, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art just acquired its first piece. During her life, she proposed shows to U.S. museums and received around 100 rejection letters, her family has said. Through Sept. 2, though, we are in luck. MoMA PS1 is hosting the first retrospective dedicated to Abad, which was organized by Victoria Sung at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where it ran last year. It consists of more than 50 works, and while it should be two or four times larger — she was protean and prolific — it is still thrilling. If you miss it, you will regret it.
Abad’s signature works are her trapuntos, quilted paintings that she stuffed and stitched, a technique she learned from an artist-friend in Boston in the early 1980s. The pieces have a warm, confident presence, and they take many forms: hypnotically patterned abstractions, aquatic scenes that teem with plant and animal life (eight comprise a gemlike show, “Underwater Wilderness,” at the Tina Kim Gallery, through Aug. 16) and masks from numerous cultures.
A jaw-dropping trapunto that Abad spent a decade making, “Marcos and His Cronies” (1985–95), is more than 16 feet tall, and represents Ferdinand Marcos, the corrupt dictator and former president of the Philippines, and his cabinet members, as fearsome, fanged demon masks used in exorcism rituals in Sri Lanka. As she often did, Abad stitched thousands of sequins, buttons and other elements to the painting, so that it almost vibrates off the wall at PS1. Marcos is gnawing on a few tiny dolls and grasping others in his hands: not subtle, not easy to forget.