Ticio Escobar


Ticio Escobar is a Paraguayan lawyer, academic, author, museum director, and former Minister of Culture of Paraguay. He has championed the rights of Indigenous peoples of Paraguay, writing about and curating shows on the topic.

Early life and education

Escobar was born on February 9, 1947, in Asunción. His father was jurist Jorge H. Escobar, and his mother is María Rosalba Argaña Ferraro. He graduated in Law at the Universidad Católica Nuestra Señora de la Asunción in 1970. Five years later, in 1974, he obtained his Master's degree here in Philosophy. During his study, he was a member of the Comisión de Defensa de los Derechos Humanos en el Paraguay, a human rights group.

Academic career

Between 1971 and 1989, Escobar was a university professor in the fields of philosophy of law, mathematical logic, philosophical anthropology, history of art and art criticism.
Until 1980, he was an art reviewer for the Museo Paraguayo de Arte Contemporáneo. In 1979 he founded the Museo del Barro in Asunción, with the objective to preserve Paraguayan culture. The same year he also founded the Museo de Arte Indígena, Centro de Artes Visuales. To this museum, of which he was also the director until 2008, he donated his own art collection.

Arts and activism

Between 1978 and 1988, Escobar was the curator for Paraguay at the Biennale of São Paulo. Furthermore, he was curator for several versions of the Venice Biennale and the biennales of Cuenca, Trujillo, San Juan, Buenos Aires, Lima and Porto Alegre, and for a number of expositions in Latin America and Europe. At the beginning of the 1990s, he joined two movements for Indigenous peoples' rights: the Asociación Indigenista del Paraguay and the Asociación Apoyo a las Comunidades Indígenas del Paraguay.
From 1991-1996 he was Director of Culture of the city of Asunción. In 1996 he won a national contest to edit a bill on culture, which was later adopted by parliament as Ley Escobar 3051/06. From 2008-2013 he was the Minister of Culture of the government of Fernando Lugo.
He was a chairman of the Paraguayan section of the International Association of Art Critics, and has written more than ten books.

Recognition

Escobar received several international awards, including: