A quilted, poster-bright scene stacks worlds like cut-out memories with a band of high-rise city buildings under a dark, stormy sky. The phrase “AN AMERICAN DREAM” is painted in all caps like a billboard. Centered below is a brown-skinned woman with long black hair and a large red knit cap. She faces us with arms folded while avoiding our gaze, wearing a striped top edged with bead-like details. Around her, smaller vignettes flicker like an office desk with papers, a grocery cart crowded with goods, a white house behind a picket fence, a red car with each stitched into a padded surface that makes the images feel raised, touchable, and heavy. A looping cord of gold yarn snakes down the right side like Lombard Street, curling toward a small, haystack-like mound at the bottom edge.
Artist Pacita Abad’s trapunto technique turns the “dream” into something you can almost measure as it swells, puckers, and presses forward, as if aspiration itself has weight. The montage reads like a catalog of promises often offered to newcomers such as work, property, consumption, mobility, the glitter of a skyline, yet the central figure’s guarded posture complicates the slogan. Her crossed arms and steady, unsmiling gaze suggest vigilance as much as arrival. It’s pride and self-possession, but also the need to brace against scrutiny, exclusion, or the fear of falling through the seams.
The figure can be read as a proxy self-portrait for Abad who was born in Basco, Batanes, Philippines. She is one body standing in for many migrant lives while the stitched construction mirrors how immigration is often lived in fragments, repairs, and continuities carried on the skin. By fusing painting with cloth and embroidery-like lines, Abad refuses a single, tidy narrative. Instead, she builds an identity that is assembled rather than granted and is bright, resilient, and insistently present to ask who gets to claim “AN AMERICAN DREAM” and what it costs to keep believing in it.
“If My Friends Could See Me Now” by Pacita Abad (Filipina American) - Acrylic, painted canvas & gold yarn on stitched, padded canvas / 1991 - SFMOMA (San Francisco, California) #WomenInArt #PacitaAbad #Abad #SelfPortrait #WomensArt #WomenArtists #art #artText #artwork #BlueskyArt #SFMOMA #Trapunto
