María Luisa Pacheco

María Luisa Pacheco (22 September 1919 – 23 April 1982) was a Bolivian painter who emigrated to the United States.

Biography

Born at La Paz, she studied at the local Academia de Bellas Artes, 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 at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid.

In 1956, Maria Luisa 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 (OAS) in Washington DC. As a result of both of those opportunities, Maria Luisa Pacheco moved to New York in 1956. The Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and also the OAS exhibit, each included the acquisition of 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.

Pacheco's abstract paintings are inspired by the native Quechua and Aymara people of Bolivia and the glaciers and peaks of the Andes Mountains.