Born on the Philippine island of Batan in 1946, Pacita Abad was forced to flee Manila in 1970 owing to her efforts against the Marcos regime. Her peripatetic life saw her living and working in more than fifty countries on six continents, including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Guatemala, Mali, and Sudan; she died of cancer in Singapore in 2004. Each place informed her work: through its materials and traditional craft techniques and through its particular ways of subjugating and marginalizing women. Particularly influential were the Tibetan thangkas, or sacred scroll paintings, she encountered in