María Luisa Pacheco was a Bolivian painter and mixed-media artist who immigrated to the United States. Despite her 20-year later career in New York, she was much more influential in Latin American art than that of the U.S.
Born in La Paz to the architect Julio Mariaca Pando, María Luisa Pacheco studied at the Academia de Bellas Artes in La Paz, later becoming a member of the faculty. In the late 1940s and until 1951, she worked at the newspaper La Razón as an illustrator and as the editor of their literary section. A scholarship from the Government of Spain allowed Pacheco to continue her studies in 1951 and 1952 as a graduate student and painting instructor at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid.
1956-1982: New York
In 1956, Pacheco was the recipient of three consecutive Fellowship Awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City. The first fellowship awarded coincided with an invitation to exhibit at the Museum of the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C. As a result of both of those opportunities, Maria Luisa Pacheco moved to New York in 1956. Both the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and the OAS exhibit acquired a Maria Luisa Pacheco painting for their permanent art collections. Those paintings are currently exhibited in the art museums of those organizations as part of the periodic rotation of their permanent collections. While in New York, Pacheco also worked as an illustrator for Life magazine, and as a textile designer.
Style and media
Beginning her work in the figurative Indigenism style of Bolivian painting predominant during the 1930s and 1940s, Pacheco belonged to the more abstract tendency of the Indigenist school strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism. Her work during the later 1950s was characterized by less reliance on color and a greater emphasis on paint texture. Pacheco's abstract paintings are inspired by the native Quechua and Aymara people of Bolivia, as well as formal references to the glaciers and peaks of Bolivia's Andes Mountains. She has been identified as an important member of the vanguard generation that introduced abstract language into Latin American art. She was part of an artist group was known as the "Generation of '52," named after the year of Revolution. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw an evolution to what some believe was Pacheco's most mature work, using a style that even more emphasized texture over color, now relying not only on paint, but also on other materials such as sand, newspaper, plywood, and corrugated cardboard. During the late 1970s and until her death, Pacheco returned somewhat to more figurative depictions of Bolivian landscape, and her work of this period was notable for its combination of abstraction and figuration.
