Before her death in 2004, the artist Pacita Abad traveled to over 60 countries and made more than 5,000 artworks. Only lung cancer stopped her; she died at age 58 in Singapore after completing a large-scale painting installation across the Alkaff Bridge. Her first major retrospective , which stopped at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2023, was an extensive, colorful tour through Abad’s engagement with art around the globe.

Now the Bay Area will have a chance to hold onto the globe-trotting Filipino American artist more permanently. Her archives have arrived at Stanford University, where researchers will be able to consult the records of her career in the place where that very career started.

Abad never intended to stay in the Bay Area. In 1970, she was on her way to Spain w

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