Edel Rodriguez
“Having grown up in Cuba, a country without free elections, I have a great admiration for the American electoral process. My family arrived in this country in 1980 and became U.S. citizens years later, eager to exercise our right to vote. These personal experiences inspired my artwork for the Unity Project, a piece which symbolizes the concept of coming together, rising up, and speaking with our votes.”
Biography:
Edel Rodriguez is a Cuban American artist who has exhibited internationally with shows in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Havana, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Toronto, and Spain. Inspired by personal history, religious rituals, politics, memory, and nostalgia, his bold, figurative works are an examination of identity, mortality, and cultural displacement.
Edel Rodriguez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1971. He was raised in El Gabriel, a small farm town surrounded by fields of tobacco and sugar cane. In 1980 Rodriguez and his family boarded a boat and left for America during the Mariel boatlift. They settled in Miami where Rodriguez was introduced to and influenced by American pop culture for the first time. Socialist propaganda and western advertising, island culture and contemporary city life, are all aspects of his life that continue to inform his work.
In 1994, Rodriguez graduated with honors in painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. In 1998, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from Manhattan’s Hunter College graduate program. Throughout his career, Rodriguez has received commissions to create artwork for numerous book publishers, advertising agencies, and editorial publications. He is a regular contributor to the The New York Times Op Ed page and The New Yorker Magazine. He has created over a hundred newspaper and magazine covers for clients such as TIME Magazine, Der Spiegel, Newsweek, The Nation, Businessweek, The New Republic, and The Village Voice. He has created dozens of book covers for clients such as Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House. Rodriguez has also created several stamps for the U.S. Postal Service and has illustrated poster and advertising campaigns for many operas, films, and Broadway shows.
Rodriguez’s artwork is in the collections of a variety of institutions, including the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., as well as in numerous private collections. His work has received numerous awards from The Art Director’s Club and The Society of Illustrators in New York City. Rodriguez is the author of four children’s books. His memoir “Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey” was published by Metropolitan books in the fall of 2023.
Visit Edelr.com for additional information.
