Pupukwësh (Rojas), 2022
Colored pencil, crayon, acrylic, and amate collage on paper
8 3/4 x 6 1/2 in (22.2 x 16.5 cm)

Pachi Muruchu (b. 1998, Cuenca, Ecuador; lives and works in New York) is an Ecuadorian painter whose work depicts the poetics, politics, objectives, and resistance that have occurred for centuries on Turtle Island. His images weave centuries of indigenous storytelling and ecological knowledge with contemporary experiences.

Muruchu is Kichwa, and his family is from pueblos in Azuay, Ecuador, but he was raised in Spanish Harlem. As he grew up in the 2000s, he was aware of the Lenape whose land his building occupied. He lived alongside Caribbean and Latinx neighbors, who lived alongside pet iguanas and cockatoos. At the heart of Muruchu’s work is a desire to access an animistic relationship to contemporary urban life. He seeks a return to what he has described as a “materialist subjectivity” that is latent beneath colonial ideologies.