Aldo Castillo

Aldo Castillo was born in Nicaragua in the middle of a civil war, the eldest of eight children. At fourteen he spent six months in Wisconsin as an exchange student and came home with a second family. When the war closed in he went to Guatemala City instead of into it, and read architecture and graphic design at Rafael Landivar University.

He was still in his twenties when the Popol Vuh Museum at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin hired him to make its Mayan, colonial and folk collections mean something to people under thirty. He stayed from 1982 to 1985 as curator and designer and organised many of the most important exhibitions the museum had held. He was showing his own work at the same time: in the summer of 1982 the Galeria El Dzunun in Guatemala City gave him a room of his own.

A scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago brought him to the United States in 1985. The revolution at home and the Iran-Contra scandal kept him here; he was granted political asylum in 1986 and went to work for the publishers Scott, Foresman and Harper-Collins. Chicago is where the dealer grew up beside the artist. He raised money for Chicago House, the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, the NAMES Project and the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, sat on the foundation board, and argued, without pause, for Latin American art.

In 1993 he put his own name over a door in the Chicago gallery district and kept it there for seventeen years. Aldo Castillo Gallery took Latin American modernists and living artists to collectors who had been offered neither. It closed on 28 August 2010, not from failure but because a fair had asked him to run it. Estero and the Miromar Design Center followed in 2011, and on 23 September 2020 he opened the rooms at 634 Fifth Avenue South in Naples, where he still meets collectors himself.