The set of six paintings made by Pacita Abad (b. 1946 in Basco; d. 2004 in Batan Island) and included in the 58th Carnegie International depict the violent civic unrest of the May 1998 Jakarta riots, which resulted in the end of Indonesian President Suharto’s 30-year dictatorship and the rule of his New Order government. Considered alongside Abad’s deep respect for traditional craft and cultural heritage from around the world (including Korean ink wash painting, Indonesian batik, Mali mud cloth, and the use of shells in Papua New Guinea), this body of work shows the artist wholly engrossed with the social and political transformation taking place around her. Painted while living in the archipelago nation’s capital, Abad looked fondly on her time in Indonesia, which recalled her childhood in the Philippines, a home she left to escape political persecution after protesting Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship. In addition to the United States, where she became a citizen in 1994, Abad lived in several other countries, including Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Singapore, and Sudan. She used her work to capture the effects of a globalizing world on everyday people, while embracing the capacity of art to forge connections across cultures, irrespective of national borders.
