CARLOS ASHIDA CUETO

(b. 1955, Mexico City) is a curator, cultural promoter, museographer, researcher, and collector. Ashida was a tireless observer of his surroundings. His unstoppable need to move led him to discover and transcend the limits of perception about works, artists, and movements of the visual and plastic arts, in a particularly intense way during the eighties and nineties of the last century. He studied architecture at the Western Institute of Technology and Higher Education, and since 1983 found his passion in the promotion and diffusion of the visual arts as a gallerist and curator. He always advocated for Guadalajara and Jalisco to have the recognition they both deserve as the birthplace of great teachers, as well as a constant source of inspiration at a local, national, and international level. Throughout his professional life, he detonated fundamental changes for the evolution of the regional and national artistic scene, working with artists who eventually became the main representatives of Mexican art abroad. Also, he worked as the director of prominent visual arts centers and institutions, the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, the Museum of Arts at the University of Guadalajara, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca, the Taller Mexicano de Gobelinos, and the gallery Arena México Arte Contemporáneo. He was Chief Curator of the Cabañas Cultural Institute, Cultural Heritage of Humanity and deputy to Mexico's participation in the ARCO 2005 Fair in Madrid.

As an independent curator, Ashida  organized several exhibitions in Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Mexico City in the last three decades. Some of the highlights are Seven Dilemmas (Dialogue between two art moments in Mexico), Assymmetric (Affinities and discrepancies: artistic collective actions/Guadalajara 1949-2006), Wheel as Nature Open Solar (Modern and Contemporary art in Jalisco), Raw Structure (An approximation to building visual culture in Tijuana), The Good Intentions (Expressions of the unforeseen) and Acne (Or the new illustrated social contract), the latter considered a parting point for Contemporary Art in Mexico. His last curatorial endeavor was the exhibition Dr. Atl: Cosmic Rotation at Fifty Years from His Death, which opened in November of 2014.

tags: curator, researcher, visual arts, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil