In her travels, she picked up a lifelong habit of collecting textiles local to the places she visited. In Foothill Cabin (1977), she painted the room she shared with Garrity in Palo Alto, the wall behind her bed decorated with the tessellating hexagonal design of a phulkari she brought home from Pakistan. Among the many woven traditions she encountered were Panamanian mola, Pakistani ralli quilts, and Bangladeshi kantha; she was also inspired by distinctive forms such as sumukhwa, a traditional style of Korean ink brush painting, and wayang, the Indonesian shadow puppet theater.

All of these techniques and styles found their way into her developing practice. Becoming curious about her work is becoming curious about the history and practice of textile-making by women the world over. As one example, Abad kept Hmong paj ntaub—story cloths sold to Western tourists—in her archive, and it’s possible to trace their influence in the flowers and animals she embroidered on clothing. Paj ntaub built on an ancient practice dating back to the third millennium BCE of embellishing clothing with floral and geometric designs. In the late 1970s, Hmong women in refugee camps pioneered a variation on the traditional paj ntaub that used similar motifs to tell stories of refugees escaping the aftermath of the Laotian Civil War. They also used brighter colors, with fresh access to industrial dyed threads in the camps. The story cloths were an assertion of Hmong cultural identity in the midst of displacement, inflected with a distinctly modern understanding of the international economy for attention and goods.

There are, without exaggeration, dozens of other traditions Abad integrated into her work. From mola, she seemed to copy the motif of patterning bold and bright lines with rickrack ribbons. In a period during which she was especially interested in wayang puppets, she made over 150 paintings rendering them. Her attraction to textiles was both intuitive and pragmatic; much like Faith Ringgold, inspired by the example of Tibetan thangkas, she had come to the realization that textiles could be rolled up and moved from place to place more easily than paintings on wood frames. Portability was essential, for she had decided by then to always be on the move.

Those who know Abad by her abstractions may be surprised to learn that some of her earliest works were social realist paintings. Around the late 1970s, she visited refugee camps in Nepal and Sudan and on the Thai-Cambodian border. Five social realist paintings in the retrospective reflect the documentary interest she took in these camps, where she interviewed journalists and relief administrators and conversed with refugees in French, learning of the treks they embarked on through jungles and mountains to arrive there. In her conversations with children—especially orphans—she noticed keenness to spend time with her, an adult who lavished them with attention, drawing them to prolong their interactions and make added attempts to circumvent language barriers. These paintings recall WPA-1era photographs by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans in their journalistic impulse. During this period, Abad came to understand herself as a “political painter.”

Her first artistic breakthrough arrived in the early 1980s, when she started taking an interest in masks across different cultural traditions, which she made with her new trapunto technique. She studied Sinhalese exorcism ritual masks from Sri Lanka and bifwebe face masks from the Songye and Luba tribes in the Congo, and she fashioned her own painted, stitched, and stuffed masks that she called Bacongo, in a nod to the influence of Central African masquerade traditions. These works are large, each over eight feet in height, and she combined the sharp angular contrasts and geometric abstraction of the carved masks with a tropical color palette. Juxtaposing loud colors against one another in the patterns that compose her masks, Abad said that she was “attracted to the dual concept of trying to be both who you are now, and what you can be.” Her comment echoes Stuart Hall’s definition of identity as a process “never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” Like Hall, Abad challenged the notion that tribal masks—which were often fetishized as symbols for entire tribal cultures and heritages—represented stable and unchanging identities, opting instead for her masks to be projects of identity creation.

Abad’s work with masks intensified at a moment when cultural practitioners in the Western art world were hotly embroiled in debates over how to understand the link between “tribal art”—referring monolithically to indigenous African, Oceanic, Asian, and American spiritual and artistic traditions—and Western modern and contemporary art. In December 1984, Abad returned to New York for Christmas and visited the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark exhibition “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.” The show was a curatorial feat, pairing hundreds of modernist pieces next to tribal objects. It generated controversy almost immediately: Critics condemned the show for privileging a Eurocentric historical timeline that placed artists like Picasso and Gauguin at the end of art history, and for deracinating tribal artifacts.

Abad shared their concerns. She saw the hierarchy between “high art” and “ethnographic, decorative craft” as just another colonial taxonomy. In the dozens of countries she visited, she was eager to learn about tribal cultures, traditions, and art, filling up her bags with beads and textiles at markets. She admired how people used buttons, shells, bones, feathers, and ribbons as creative ornamentation for their bodies, their dress, and their homes—even as many in the Western art world, under the sway of figures such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, increasingly placed a premium on “modernist” aesthetic attributes like purity and flatness, emphasizing painting to the exclusion of most other forms. This was the context in which Abad painted: Museums were making efforts to institutionalize work by “primitive,” “folk,” and “outsider” artists—all while prominent critics and curators promoted a future of modern art that would be more formal, more minimalist, and more detached from social and political problems. As MoMA’s “Primitivism” exhibition emphasized, these two tendencies were not always in tension but often mutually reinforced each other.

In Masks From Six Continents, a public art commission for the Washington, DC, Metro Center, that she completed in 1990, Abad produced mask paintings representing Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and North and South America. By giving them names like “Mayan Mask,” harking back to an ancient civilization; “Hopi Mask,” citing a particular tribe in southwestern North America; and “Subali,” a Hindu name denoting strength, she sought to destabilize modern racial and national identity categories. Meanwhile, she titled the European mask simply “European Mask,” calling attention to its emptiness.

Her mask paintings underlined the argument that Western modernism and “primitive” art did not need to be separated from one another. Still, even she at times revealed an inclination to romanticize pure, uncorrupted artistic traditions, as evidenced by her lifelong interest in finding Indigenous crafts untouched by colonialism and capitalism; returning to the Philippines, Abad was intent on locating tribal cloth that was “not Spanish-influenced, not Catholic-influenced.” Yet the traditions that she drew from, much like her own work, flowered at the unique crossroads of inherited craft and tourism, political upheaval, and the global flow of industrial goods.

Although she soon turned away from the social realism that predominated in her early work, Abad continued to make figurative works—most notably her Immigrant Experience series, comprising some 20 paintings completed throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Whereas her social realist paintings resemble newsprint—flat and objective, and mostly bereft of color—her Immigrant Experience paintings are animated. These pieces feature triumphant and iconic emblems of empowerment: L.A. Liberty (1992) depicts a brown Asian woman in the guise of the Statue of Liberty, outfitted in a patterned quilt with multicolored beams shooting out around her.

She was attuned to the profusions of color that blossomed in immigrant, working-class neighborhoods that others might have regarded as underdeveloped zones absent of aesthetic significance. Attentive to the ways that ordinary people engaged in art-making practices, she represented such details as hand-painted deli signs advertising hot dogs, pretzels, and ice cream, and display cases stocked with hand-crafted goods. In an interview in 1991, Abad was asked what she had “contributed to this country as an artist.” She responded, without missing a beat: “Color! I have given it color!” These paintings show that this color came from an unpretentious passion for the vibrant, eye-catching products of everyday labor.

In the quieter portraits of daily life she painted on padded canvas, Abad portrayed such scenes as an Asian-owned laundry business or a Hispanic contractor’s storefront. In Korean Shopkeepers (1993), Abad reproduced the rich setting of a grocery store, with its fruits, flowers, and advertisements, applying a variety of materials, including buttons, sequins, beads, and yarn, to the surface of her trapunto. Painted in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising in response to the police beating of Rodney King—during which many Korean shops were vandalized—Abad envisioned a scene of harmony and solidarity.

In her later years, Abad began to receive more recognition in the United States for her work, and she was regularly included in group shows with other women artists of color, immigrant artists, and textile artists throughout the ’90s. By then, she was also several years into creating the work for which she is best known today: her abstract mixed-media paintings, which include both trapuntos and textile collages. A weakness of the Abad retrospective is that it slightly underrepresents this wonderful body of work—by far her most extensive—in the interest of providing a career-spanning survey. There’s a taste of the richness of this trove, and its connectedness to the rest of her work, in 100 Years of Freedom: From Batanes to Jolo (1998), a collage that integrates fabrics from every province of the Philippines. The ethnographic piece, with its draping triangular pieces of cloth, once fit snugly on a wall in her home in Singapore, a regular reminder of the hybridity of her motherland.

At the end of 2001, Abad was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, and she spent much of the following year in Singapore undergoing treatment. She continued to work vigorously through her illness, beginning her last series of trapunto paintings, Endless Blues, which she worked on while listening to the music of Robert Cray and Miles Davis. Until the end of her life, she persisted in experimenting with new materials and techniques, creating drawings that she transformed into paper pulp works adorned with fabric, yarn, and found objects.

Abad, who was dedicated to art education and often led workshops teaching children and adults how to stitch and paint, would by all accounts have been excited to see her work displayed in museums. This exhibition affords her a level of recognition from the American art establishment that she never received while alive, and it is also an occasion for the celebration of the many other textile practices flourishing in the hands of women worldwide, which museums still so often struggle to appreciate on their own terms.