Join Pio Abad, Victoria Sung, and Matthew Villar Miranda for a conversation about the work, life, influences, and legacy of the late Philippine-born artist Pacita Abad, moderated by Renée van der Avoird. Fleeing the Marcos regime in the Philippines, Abad arrived in the United States in 1970. Her work resonates with the various artistic communities she encountered on her global travels, incorporating diverse cultural traditions and techniques—from Korean ink brush painting to Indonesian batik. Underrecognized in her lifetime, her work is defined by her engagement with social justice and evolving material exploration.   

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Pacita Abad. 

Pio Abad’s wide-ranging body of work—encompassing drawing, painting, textiles, installation, and text— mines alternative and repressed historical events, offering counternarratives that draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies, and people. Shortlisted for the 2024 Turner Prize, Abad’s solo exhibitions include Fear of Freedom Makes Us See Ghosts, Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila (2022); Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite, Kadist, San Francisco (2019); Splendour, Oakville Galleries (2019); Notes on Decomposition, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2016); 1975 – 2015, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney and Some Are Smarter Than Others, Gasworks, London (2014). He is also the curator of the estate of his aunt, Pacita Abad. He has recently co-curated monographic exhibitions on Pacita Abad at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila; Spike Island, Bristol and Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai. He also co-edited the publication Pacita Abad: A Million Things to Say in 2021. 

Matthew Villar Miranda (he/they/siya) joined the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 2023 and formerly worked as the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center, where they co-organized exhibitions by Pao Houa Her, Paul Chan, and Pacita Abad. They serve on the board of Museums Moving Forward (MMF), a Ford and Mellon Foundation-funded initiative of an intergenerational, cross-institutional coalition of art museum professionals committed to advancing equity across the museum field. They co-curated the Art for Justice Fund-supported exhibition Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration at the Arizona State University Art Museum (ASUAM). They received their BA in History of Art from UC Berkeley (2013) and graduated among the inaugural Class of ASU-Los Angeles County Museum of Art Master's Fellowship in Art History (2021). They research queer intimacies and decolonial interventions by artists of the imagined and material tropics. 

Victoria Sung is the Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she oversees the museum's long-standing MATRIX series of contemporary art and works with artists to create exhibitions, publications, and public programs. From 2015 to 2023, she was Associate Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where she organized large-scale artist surveys and retrospectives, including Pacita Abad (2023), Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall (2019), and Siah Armajani: Follow This Line (2018). She also commissioned artists to make new works for the museum, including Pao Houa Her, Candice Lin, Laure Prouvost, Rayyane Tabet, and Shen Xin, among others. She regularly gives talks on modern and contemporary art and contributes her writing to exhibition catalogs, including most recently at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Chisenhale Gallery, London, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. 

Renée van der Avoird is the Associate Curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Specializing in work by modern and contemporary Canadian women artists, she has curated exhibitions including Pacita Abad (2024); Sarindar Dhaliwal: When I grow up I want to be a namer of paint colours (2023); Denyse Thomasos: just beyond (2022); Kim Ondaatje: The House on Piccadilly Street (2021); and Betty Goodwin: Moving Towards Fire (2019). Prior to joining the AGO in 2018, van der Avoird held positions as Associate Curator/Registrar at the MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie; Assistant Director of Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto; and Curatorial Mentor at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. She has contributed writing to various periodicals including Border Crossings, C Magazine, Black Flash, and exhibitions such as Russna Kaur: DREAM MACHINE (try walking on a path of splinters with no shoes) (W Projects, 2023); Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment (McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2021); and Magnetic North: Imagining Canada in Painting 1910-1940 (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, (2021).