Fernando Castro Pacheco was a successor of the Mexican Muralist movement. Pacheco was born in Merida Mexico in 1918. His renowned murals captured the unique history of the Mayan and Yucatan. He began painting, drawing and modeling in his adolescence, joining the School of Fine Arts in Merida 1933. He crafted his first wood and linoleum-cut engravings in 1939. In 1940, he helped found La Escuela Libre de Las Artes Plasticas de Yucatan.
 
As a teacher at his school, Pacheco employed the innovative technique of “place-based learning”, a method of teaching where lessons are conducted outside the conventional classroom setting. Realism was the focal point of Pacheo’s teachings as he had a passion for local history, contemporary Yucatan life, and Mexican Federal Politics. Through realism, Pacheo was able to commemorate these passions by recreating his perception of his reality in a vibrant and timeless manner.
 
In 1942, he created his first series of lithographs and large format engravings. The engravings were used to decorate schools throughout Merida in form of murals. He also held his first art exhibition in the Merida in 1942 at the University of Yucatan.
 
In 1943, Pacheco traveled to Mexico City where he worked on drawings, paintings, sculptures and enamels. His artistic talents progressed immensely through the practice he obtained working for various publications and books. Living in the capital city, his interest in federal politics grew and he used his artistic expressions to advance democratic discourse after the Mexican Revolution. Pacheco even participated as a guest artist with the Taller de Grafica Popular, a group of writers and artists who used art advance revolutionary social causes.
 
In 1945, Pacheco made his first international appearance at an exhibition in San Francisco, California.  Two years later, he participated in a collective exhibition in Havana, Cuba.
 
Pacheco decided to expand his repertoire to scenography and costume design. He worked for various ballets at the esteemed Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1953.
 
Pacheco was appointed the director of the National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City in 1961. As an artist and visionary, he actively implemented pedagogical changes that progressed the institution. Under his administration, the school nurtured and created many important Mexican cultural figures. While teaching, he remained a prominent artist and activist. As a successor of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, he participated in one of the most important movements of Mexican national art: muralism. In 1961 he also won the Painting Prize of the Mexican Plastic Show, organized by INBA. The INBA later sent him to Spain, Italy, France, England, Holland and Belgium to study their styles.
 
After completing his studies, Castro Pacheco returned to his native Mérida in 1971 and continued to produce artistic works. In the early ‘70s, the artist was commissioned by the state of Yucatan to create murals for the Government Palace. The project would take him the rest of the decade to complete. Pacheco was a skilled muralist but it was decided that the paintings would be ‘transportable’ and mobile. He painted 27 murals that captured the history of the region, dignified the Mayan people, and portrayed the struggles of the working class. Castro Pacheco’s murals had impressionistic qualities and experimental color choices that did not exist in the strict realism that characterized the murals of his predecessors.
 
The Yucatán Museum of Contemporary Art gave Pacheco one of his greatest honors by dedicating a room to him in 1994. The National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago had a large display of his work in their 2012 exhibition "Hanal Pixán. Food for the Souls.”
 
In his long career as a painter and muralist, Fernando Castro Pacheco ventured into engraving, drawing, sculpture, watercolor, ceramics, set design and illustration. Pacheco helped define the identity of Mexico and specifically the Yucatan through his body of work.  He has given Mexican art one of its greatest exhibitors. The work of this prolific Yucatecan artist has been exhibited in cities in the United States, Japan, Europe and Latin America.