Pachi Muruchu’s (@muruchuwa) solo exhibition Sumak Yachay was reviewed by #JohnYau @hyperallergic🌱 “By using amate, Muruchu identifies his project with a resistance to colonization and Euro-centric values, including capitalism. This resistance is joined by a desire to understand one’s legacy and alternative worldviews, and connections to the material world. The small ‘Untitled’ is an overhead view of a woman with a noticeably Incan profile lying on her side in bed. She is reading An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru, an English translation of the Spanish conquest of Peru, as told by Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui to a Spanish missionary, and transcribed by a mestizo assistant. Yupanqui, the penultimate ruler of the Inca dynasty, tells a different story than the one widely circulated by the Spanish conquerors. The fact that Yupanqui’s story survives is proof of his resistance to Spanish pacification. All of this suggests that Muruchu researches his subjects, and that his art doesn’t arise solely out of his feelings or an idealized form of resistance approved by mainstream culture mavens, in which a heroic leader works within the system and leads people to enlightened thinking. In these works Muruchu merges his radical beliefs with a complex sense of color and the moods it can conjure and inflect. The joining of material, process, and content culminates in the artist’s rejection of white America and its efforts to uphold the status quo. By introducing books and discursive images into his work, he invites viewers to begin educating themselves about the long-rotten history of the Americas, from the North Pole to the South Pole, and how it is all connected. I am anxious to see where Muruchu will go and, given the state of this increasingly deranged country, I am anxious for him.”—John Yau Sumak Yachay continues at Friends Indeed Gallery (716 Sacramento Street, Chinatown, San Francisco, California) through December 2. #PachiMuruchu