Stitching a Brighter World: Starting the Year with Pacita Abad

The new year has barely started and already the world feels heavy. Most mornings begin with a scroll through headlines full of conflict and uncertainty, and the familiar mix of anger and exhaustion that follows, and it feels strange to be making coffee, feeding the pets and planning a work day while the wider world seems to crack in every direction. Through all that noise I keep returning to the life and work of Pacita Abad.

She has been everywhere in recent years, with major retrospectives, glowing reviews and museum banners in cities she didn’t live long enough to see her name in. What stays with me, though, isn’t the late fame so much as the way she brought colour, care and political reality into the same frame, and how determined she was to keep stitching her own world together even when the larger one was hostile. Starting the year with her feels right.

Pacita Abad was born in 1946 in Batanes, at the northern tip of the Philippines, into a politically active family, and she planned to become a lawyer. That path ended in the 1970s when she helped lead student protests against the Marcos regime, an opposition with real consequences that forced her to leave the country. She went to the United States expecting it to be a stopover on the way somewhere else, and instead it became the beginning of a completely different life.

In San Francisco she started to paint. Said that simply, it sounds too neat, but it was a huge turn: from law to art, and from one country to a life that eventually took in more than sixty. She travelled constantly, to Bangladesh, Sudan, Yemen, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Kenya and Singapore, taking in markets, textiles, parades, boats, food stalls and crowds. She listened to people whose lives were rarely treated as central, and stitched what she learned into her work.

I love that she never softened those stories to make them easier to take. She painted refugees, undocumented workers, domestic workers, couples with mixed immigration status, shopkeepers: the people who hold a society up without anyone noticing. She once said artists have a responsibility to remind society of its obligations, and you can feel that in almost everything she made. Her work isn’t protest on a placard. It protests by looking at people fully.

Pacita is best known for her trapuntos: large, padded, quilt-like works that hang like banners but act like paintings. She stitched and stuffed the surfaces, then layered on fabric, buttons, mirrors, lace, sequins, shells and anything else she could find. From across the room they look jubilant, all blazing orange and pink, deep blue and dense pattern. Up close, the stories come into focus.

In the early 1990s, while living in the U.S., she made her Immigrant Experience series, whose titles read like snatches of overheard conversation: Caught at the Border, L.A. Liberty, Korean Shopkeepers, How Mali Lost Her Accent. The trapuntos are packed with figures, text and pattern, with passports, planes, fences and city grids, and they aren’t polite. They are funny, angry and tender, and as busy as the lives they show.

When the news fills up with borders, boats, visas and detention, I think of those works, which are decades old and yet could have been made yesterday. History doesn’t move in a straight line; the same fears keep resurfacing, and artists like Pacita keep putting human faces in the middle of them. What strikes me most is that she never chose between joy and seriousness. The colour is ecstatic and the surfaces almost baroque, while the subjects are displacement, racism, labour and exile, so that beauty in her work is never an escape but a way of holding hard truths in front of us long enough that we actually look.

Thinking about Pacita at the start of a difficult year doesn’t comfort me in an escapist way so much as steady me. There is real hope in how she moved through the world: pushed out of her home, she didn’t turn inward but kept looking outward, learning from communities far from any art-world centre, treating everyday materials with respect, and making room in her work for people rarely invited into galleries, all in a visual language that was never shy. That has something to teach us about how we live with art, and how we collect it.

Collecting with intention doesn’t mean buying artists with big museum careers, and most of us will never own a Pacita Abad trapunto. Her story can still change the questions we ask in front of any artwork, at any size. Instead of asking whether something will go up in value, we might ask what world the artist is stitching together, whose stories the work holds, and whether this is an image we want to live with and keep talking to, day after day.

We can pay attention to artists who, like Pacita, work in between: migrants and exiles, people who move between languages and places, people who make art while parenting, caregiving, living with illness or facing discrimination. We can respect “humble” materials like paper, fabric, found objects and small canvases as proof of ingenuity rather than something lesser. And we can let a painting, drawing or textile change us when it speaks honestly about being alive now.

None of this has to be grand. It could mean choosing one piece this year that feels like a companion rather than décor, learning the story behind a vintage work you inherited, or following an artist whose life is very different from yours and letting their images widen your world a little.

When writing about an artist like Pacita Abad, it is tempting to turn her life into a tidy metaphor, with exile as resilience, hardship as fuel and bright colour as triumph, but that would flatten her. Her story is more complicated, and she paid a real price for the life she lived. Still, the fact that her work exists, that it keeps travelling and meeting new eyes and still hangs in rooms where people stop and breathe differently in front of it, feels like an ongoing gift. In a year that opens with so much uncertainty, it grounds me to think of someone who made it her job to stitch the world together, its places, people, fabrics and stories, and then hand those stitched worlds back to us to stand in front of and learn from.

We don’t have to be Pacita Abad to borrow some of that spirit. We can treat art as a way of paying closer attention rather than as background, let certain works anchor our homes when everything else is shifting, and build small, intentional collections that hold on to the values we care about, even when the currents are rough.

The headlines will keep coming, and much of what they bring will be hard to bear. And still there is this: a painting, a drawing, a hand-stitched surface glowing on a wall, reminding us that making, looking and caring are still possible. For this first post of the year, that is what I want to carry forward, not denial and not naïve optimism, but the stubborn, colourful hope Pacita Abad practised with every stitch.