Meet the Artists: Session 5
Maya Fuji, Pachi Muruchu , and Piero Penizzotto
Maya, Pachi, and Piero will be in residence at Fountainhead from June 24 to July 22, 2026.
Maya Fuji
Maya Fuji (b. 1988, Kanazawa, Japan) is a Japanese-American artist working across painting and traditional Japanese craft, whose practice centers on the liminal experience of being an issei mixed-race woman navigating life between cultures. Her work draws on mythology, folklore, and the subcultures of Showa, Heisei, and the Bay Area to portray nostalgic memories of childhood and the feeling of foreignness in both Japanese and American spaces. Central to her practice is an investigation of the Tsukumogami and Yaoyorozu No Kami — animist and Shinto concepts in which spirits inhabit objects and the world at large — which she reimagines as having immigrated to the US alongside her family, existing within the cultural landscape of the Bay Area in the 1990s and early 2000s. Through this framework, Fuji meditates on the ways ethnically mixed people, immigrants, and children of immigrants keep traditions alive while forging new ways of living. A self-taught artist, Fuji has had solo exhibitions at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, YOD Gallery, Osaka, and SWIM Gallery, San Francisco, and her work is held in the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum. She is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.
Pachi Muruchu
In partnership with Zona Maco
Patricio "Pachi" Muruchu (b. 1998, Cuenca, Ecuador) is a sculptor and painter working in the Bronx, whose practice centers on the recovery and re-mythologization of urban detritus. Taking rubble from demolition sites, he produces molds of building fragments — former clinics, offices, and homes — that he then paints against, invoking the tension between wetness and dryness that mirrors the feminine and masculine principles of Kichwa cosmology. Drawing on mythology and scripture from his ancestry and beyond, Morocho investigates the connective tissue between ancient worldviews and contemporary socio-ecological contradiction, seeking convergences of the profane and sacred across the landscapes of migration and struggle. Muruchu received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from Rutgers University, and has had solo exhibitions at Micki Meng Gallery, San Francisco, and The Latinx Project, New York.
Piero Penizzotto
Piero Penizzotto is a Peruvian-American artist born and based in New York, whose practice centers on human-sized painted papier-mâché sculptures drawn from scenes of daily life across New York, South Florida, and Peru. His figures capture the texture of familial and social bonds — embraces, conversations, and intimate moments — rendered at a scale that transforms viewers into active participants in the work. Through intricate attention to attire, expression, and body language, Penizzotto investigates the ways togetherness and human connection sustain us across cultures and communities. He received his BFA with honors from Hunter College in 2022, and has had solo exhibitions at White Columns, New York, Primary Gallery, Miami, and WHAAM! Gallery, New York. His work is held in the El Espacio Collection, Miami.
