Groovy: The Colors of Pacita Abad (2005)

65 minutes, screening continuously

Released posthumously, Groovy: The Colors of Pacita Abad (2005) is a portrait of the artist at work across the globe. Through interviews with Pacita Abad, Jack Garrity, and friends, collaborators and family, Groovy offers an intimate and frank look at Pacita’s life, inspirations, and ambitions, and the sometimes rocky road to realizing these.

The film is screened to coincide with the last week of the exhibition, ‘Pacita Abad: I Thought the Streets Were Paved with Gold’ as well as the launch of its accompanying publication, available at the Art Jameel Shop and online.

Known for her large scale, colorful ‘trapunto’ works, Pacita Abad (1946-2004) was a Philippine-American artist whose prolific oeuvre spanned continents and ranged from abstract forms to social realist depictions of everyday life in the U.S.A, the Philippines and elsewhere. Having lived and travelled widely across Asia and many parts of the world, Abad’s work is an amalgamation of techniques and subject matter drawn from her lived experiences and mostly worked in her signature ‘trapunto’ technique of padding and stitching canvas before painting and layering it with textiles, printed objects and other materials such as jewelry, buttons, and shells.