Guadalajara has long been Mexico’s artisanal secret, but this year’s Art Week proved the city is no longer operating in the shadows. With fairs like Mexico City’s Material and Acme drawing major galleries to Jalisco—alongside a strong network of local studios, design houses, and experimental spaces—Guadalajara is stepping up as one of the country’s leading contemporary art platforms.
Its balance is unmissable, blending tradition, innovation, local craftsmanship, and global dialogue. The city’s creative ecosystem feels collaborative rather than commercial, shaped by artists, curators, and collectors who value process as much as presentation. As attention shifts toward Guadalajara, it’s actively participating in the future of Mexico’s art scene.
Below, we’re sharing a few of our favorite moments from Guadalajara Art Week—and the artists and spaces you’ll want to keep on your radar.
Estación Material, Vol. 4
Courtesy of Material by Ana Karen Morales de Narrativo.
Estación Material, Vol. 4, the tapatío offspring of Mexico City’s renowned Material Art Fair, broke away from the traditional booth format this year and took over PLATAFORMA in Guadalajara’s Colonia Americana. Spanning two full floors, the fair showcased 21 galleries and projects, each presenting new or never-before-seen work, with the stipulation that every presentation include at least one Mexican artist. The result felt closer to a large-scale exhibition than a conventional fair. On the first floor, local artist Ernesto Solana presented reflections on flora and fauna, while upstairs, another tapatío, Gonzalo Lebrija, framed the space with work shown by Travesía Cuatro. The experience extended beyond the art itself: on the rooftop, Bar de la Cruz made its soft launch inside what was once the chapel of the former funeral home, with a striking design by Kenya Rodríguez that gave the fair a clandestine architectural edge. Combined with talks, live arts, gastronomy, and creative encounters, Estación Material confirmed its place as an essential platform for discovering the most relevant voices in contemporary Mexican art.
Estudio ACME HOLODROP
Courtesy of Sala ROXY and Estudio ACME.
With the artistic direction of Claudia Cisneros, Holodrop is a project of Salón ACME—one of the most important fairs on Mexico City’s Art Week—now presented in Guadalajara as part of Estudio ACME. Taking place on September 26, 2025, at Sala Roxy, the program brought together seven projects by local artists who use the body and matter as tools to explore the passage from the energetic and vibratory to the immaterial through diverse languages and formats. Designed to spark a direct dialogue with its site, Holodrop activated new forms of artistic experience that lean into the performative, the sonic, and the ephemeral.
Travesía Cuatro Yo Soy Semilla
Courtesy of the artist and Travesía Cuatro. Photos by Agustín Arce.
Travesía Cuatro’s Guadalajara space, housed in a historic Barragán-designed building, presented Yo soy semilla, a solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Rayana Rayo running through December 13, 2025. Featuring ten deeply intimate paintings, the show unfolds as a series of self-portraits that navigate the terrain of the subconscious, blending personal archetypes with universal symbols of nature, light, and memory. Rayo’s fitomorphic figures emerge like dream fragments—part diary, part cosmogony—drawing on animist and Afro-Brazilian traditions as well as her own psychic landscapes. Installed within one of Mexico’s most iconic modernist settings, Yo soy semilla offers viewers an encounter between inner worlds and architectural history, where the resonance of Barragán’s space amplifies the luminous, haunting energy of Rayo’s work.
Centro para la Cultura y las Artes de la Ribera (CCAR) TRANSFIGURACIONES
Courtesy of the artist and Centro para la Cultura y las Artes de la Ribera.
Courtesy of the artist and Centro para la Cultura y las Artes de la Ribera.
Outside Guadalajara’s main art circuit, the Centro para la Cultura y las Artes de la Ribera (CCAR) in Chapala hosted one of Art Week’s most captivating exhibitions: TRANSFIGURACIONES by Antonio Quintero. The museum itself—a stunning lakeside architectural landmark—is a work of art, but Quintero’s show transforms it into something even more evocative. His sculptures, crafted in high-temperature ceramics, fuse clay with screened metallic powders and fragments collected from his family’s blacksmith workshop in Tonalá (a town highly renowned for its ceramic work.) Over five years of experimentation, Quintero has developed a unique material language—part earth, part metal—that blurs the boundary between craft and innovation. Each vessel becomes a meditation on transformation, embodying his reflections on fatherhood, care, and the poetics of labor. Exploring both tradition and experimentation, TRANSFIGURACIONES is an intimate study of how memory and matter intertwine, where industrial residue becomes relic, and the handmade transcends its form to speak of origin, continuity, and rebirth.
Galería Mascota @ Kenya Rodriguez Studio BRUMA
Courtesy of Kenya Rodríguez and Galería Mascota.
Courtesy of Kenya Rodríguez and Galería Mascota.
Kenya Rodríguez y Galería Mascota was another collaborative exhibition that marked a defining moment for Guadalajara’s creative landscape. Presented inside Rodríguez’s studio for the first time, the show explored the intersection of utilitarian design and contemporary art through a dialogue between form, light, and emotion. At its center was BRUMA, a luminous collaboration between Rodríguez and Antonio Pedroza, a family of modular lamps and screens that balance solidity and transparency to adapt to each space. Accompanied by a culinary performance conceived with chef Alejandra Dávila, the exhibition blurred boundaries between disciplines, turning food into another medium of reflection. Featuring works by JIS (Mexico), Yves Scherer (Switzerland), Tenki Hiramatsu and Kodai Ujiie (Japan), William Anastasi (U.S.), Charlotte Vander Borght (Belgium), and Machteld Rullens (Netherlands), the show underscored Guadalajara’s role as a global creative hub where design, art, and architecture converge to reimagine how we inhabit space..
Estudio Atenea
Courtesy of Estudio Atenea.
Courtesy of Estudio Atenea.
You can’t talk about Guadalajara without mentioning its deep ceramic lineage, a craft so embedded in the region’s identity that it feels like part of its DNA. From the ateliers of Tonalá to masters like Paco Padilla in Tlaquepaque, clay continues to shape cultural legacy. New-generation spaces like Estudio Atenea by Debra Heftye prove that craftsmanship and contemporary design can coexist beautifully. Atenea is a multidisciplinary space that brings together PECA, TRIBUTO, and THE NORM, three creative forces redefining what Mexican craftsmanship looks like today. Their work merges minimal design and ancestral techniques, celebrating purity of form and the spirit of the handmade. Using natural materials and collaborating with local artisans whose ancestral processes remain alive in their daily practice, they bridge the artisanal and the aesthetic. At its core, its philosophy reminds us that true design lies in simplicity: when we touch something handmade, we connect not only with the object itself but with its maker, its material origin, and the living tradition that sustains it.
Andrea Ferrero – A veces duermo con los ojos abiertos
Courtesy of artist and PALMA.
At PALMA – Sala 1, artist Andrea Ferrero transformed the playground into a stage of power and surveillance. In her exhibition A veces duermo con los ojos abiertos (September 24 – December 31, 2025), familiar objects like seesaws, swings, and slides are reimagined with grotesque gargoyles, quimeras, and pointed ornaments, exposing the ways innocence and obedience intertwine. The works suggest that even gestures of play—swinging, sliding, balancing—can become choreographies of control, watched over by monstrous figures that both guard and unsettle. Ferrero’s installations blur the line between vigilance and imagination, reminding us that no action is ever truly free from invisible orders of power.
Castillo Interior otro dibujo con onda
Courtesy of artist.
Curated by Josephine Dorr and Hiram Constantino, otro dibujo con onda opened at Castillo Interior in Guadalajara as part of a collaboration with Otro Espacio, Onda MX, and Taller e+e. The exhibition redefined drawing not as a preparatory act but as an expanded practice capable of holding material, political, and emotional depth. Featuring ten young artists—most under 30 and from across Mexico—the show presented new works created specifically for the occasion, ranging from poetic object pieces and sculptural drawings to large-scale murals and sound installations. Highlights included Charlie Godet Thomas’s envelope-poem Strandline, Guadalupe Vidal’s cracked-wall installation Notas sobre una caída anunciada, and Daniela Guerra Guerra’s sculptural meditations on the body as a creative refuge. Founded to give voice to new generations of artists, collectors, and audiences, Castillo Interior stands out in Guadalajara’s growing art scene for its commitment to experimentation and critical dialogue, fostering connections that extend beyond the traditional art circuit. Through otro dibujo con onda, the gallery affirms its role as a meeting point between emerging talent and the broader currents of contemporary art in Mexico and Latin America.
Courtesy of artist.
