Carlos Mare

Carlos Mare- (Carlos M. Rodriguez - aka Mare139)- b.1965 NYC- Puerto Rican American Sculptor/Painter/Scholar with a lengthy professional interdisciplinary practice in the arts. He was born and raised between NYC's Upper West Side and South Bronx through its most tumultuous period of decay and earliest days of an emerging culture to be named Hip Hop in the early 80s. Mare gained early acclaim as a child for painting subway trains and his appearance in the famed documentary Style Wars in 1983. Over the years he would go on to pioneer Modern Graffiti Sculpture and painting, contemporary Academia about Hip Hop culture, and venture into technology with Digital Graffiti, notably launching Hip Hop online during the earliest years of the internet and subsequently earning the prestigious Webby Award for producing the Style Wars website in 2006.

Among his most known projects is the designing of the Annual BET Awards sculpture (Black Entertainment Award) in 2001. Award winners include Stevie Wonder, Prince, Beyonce, JayZ, Kanye West, Kobe Bryant, and Halle Berry among others.

Throughout the years' Mare has always committed himself to all disciplines of creativity especially fine art, technology, and education, often lecturing at Universities and Museums globally and touring as a US State Department Cultural Ambassador for Urban Art. In 2019 he became a founding member and curator of the Museum of Graffiti in Miami and in 2021 he launched M139 Design Studio for his multifaceted artistic practices.

Mare currently runs his art studio and practice out of Southern Florida and continues to lecture and exhibit his sculptures, paintings, and drawings. His work is now in the Museum of Modern Art collection, and Pera Art Museum.

Most recently he lectured in Saudi Arabia at Ithra- The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture. Forthcoming in 2022 is an exhibition of his B-boy Abstract sculptures for Beyond the Streets- Shanghai, China, Next Wave: New Contemporaries of the Abstract Moment- at the Ft. Wayne Museum of Art, Carrie Furnace- Pittsburgh- Grit and Graffiti residency at Rivers of Steel, Breaking Paris- 2024 Olympics