Grabbed from Wikipedia:
In 1948 he won the first prize at the Ecuadorian Salón Nacional de Acuarelistas y Dibujantes. In 1955, at the age of 36, he won first prize at the Third Hispano-American Biennial of Art in Barcelona, Spain, for El ataúd blanco and in 1957 he was named the best South American painter at the Fourth Biennial of São Paulo.
During 1942 and 1943, Guayasamín traveled to the United States and Mexico, where he met Orozco. They traveled together to many of the diverse countries in Latin America. They visited countries like Peru, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Through these travels he found the indigenous lifestyle and poverty that appeared in his paintings.
One of his biggest and most controversial paintings was a mural that he painted for the congress of Ecuador. In 1988, he was asked by the congress of Ecuador to paint a mural depicting the history of Ecuador. The United States Government critiqued the mural because in one of the panels, there appeared a Nazi helmet with the lettering CIA, referring to the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States.
The artist's last exhibits were inaugurated by him personally in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, and in the Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires in 1995. In Quito, Guayasamín built a museum that features his work. Guayasamín's images capture the political oppression, racism, poverty, and class division found in much of South America.
Oswaldo Guayasamín dedicated his life to painting, sculpting, collecting, however, he adulated the ideals of the communist Cuban Revolution in general and Fidel Castro in particular. He was given a prize for "an entire life of work for peace" by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. His death on March 10, 1999 was marked by a day of national strikes by the indigenous people (whom he spent his life supporting) and other sectors of society, and was considered a great loss to Ecuador. He is still lauded as a national treasure.
In 2002, three years after his death, Oswaldo's masterwork, La Capilla del Hombre ("The Chapel of Man"), was completed and opened to the public. The Chapel is meant to document not only man's cruelty to man but also the potential for greatness within humanity. It is co-located with Guayasamín's home in the hills overlooking Quito.
