In 1978, the artist Pacita Abad was dating a development economist who traveled the world for his work. Over the following two years they spent time in Bangladesh, Sudan, and Thailand. While he was at conventions, she explored, learning art techniques from Indigenous populations. When war broke out in Cambodia, Abad traveled to the Thai-Cambodian border and began to take photographs and draw. It was the beginning of her career as an artist. Abad often created very large paintings of primitive masks and people, then moved to trapunto painting, which entailed quilting her painted canvases and incorporating beads, shells, cloth, and mirrors. Abad died in 2004, at 58, but a bold sense of color and pattern is energetically alive in her art. Don’t miss the 50 works on view at MoMA PS1. —Elena Clavarino