PRESS | NEW YORK19 April 2024
Overlooked During Her Lifetime, Filipino American Artist Pacita Abad Has Suddenly Become a Global Star
It’s been a dramatic turn of events for an artist who was mostly denied mainstream recognition while she was alive; at the time, work deemed as feminine, decorative, and ethnic as hers seldom attracted serious attention from Western critics. “We found about 100 rejection letters from different US museums,” says Pio Abad, Pacita’s nephew and an artist in his own right. “She made these proposals to show a social-realist series, and she wrote to all these museums. She got these rejection letters one after the other, a stack—she kept them all. Now she has one of the biggest touring museum shows in the US.”
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