Augusto Marín was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1921. He is considered one of the greatest Puerto Rican painters of the 20th century. At just twelve years of age, his talent earned him a scholarship to study painting at the workshop of Sánchez Felipe, a very well-known Spanish artist. While in the Army during World War II, he created Polito, a comic strip published by the newspaper El Mundo.
From 1949 to 1955, he took courses at the Arts Students League of New York in advanced studies in painting, drawing and design under the guidance of renowned artists such as Harry Stenberg, Ivan Olinsky, John Corbino and Reginald Marsh. Marín then studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he specialized in mural design. He also studied stained glass techniques with the master Arnaldo Maas in San Juan, and continued perfecting these techniques at the workshop of Henri Mesterom in Maastrich, Holland. Marín finally completed his art education in 1983, when he took a graduate course in lithography at the University of Notre Dame. After graduating, he served as a professor of painting and design at the School of Fine Arts of the Puerto Rican Institute of Culture in San Juan. Shortly after, in 1987, he began teaching as a professor at the University of Puerto Rico's Carolina campus.
Marín's murals are present in public and private buildings all over Puerto Rico. Some of these can be seen at: the Luis A. Ferré Center of Fine Arts in Santurce, the Surfside Mansions condominium in Isla Verde, the commercial center at Laguna Gardens in Carolina, the Searle building in Caguas and the Colegio de Abogados complex in Miramar.
Marín's work has been featured in over seventy expositions, held in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Germany, Monaco and the United States. Throughout these expositions, he received international prizes and acclaim. Presently, his art can be found in private collections and museums, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, the Puerto Rico Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico, the Museum of the University of Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican Institute of Culture and the Puerto Rican Arts and Sciences Association in San Juan; the Museum of Art in Ponce; and the International Collection of Robert Kemm in Beverly Hills, California. He was awarded the 2004 National Prize of Culture by the Puerto Rican Institute of Culture. In his later years, Marín worked on various sculptures, lithography and silk screens in Pietra Santa, Paris and Mexico, until his death in 2011. Source: Fundación de las Artes Augusto Marín
