Edel Rodriguez is a Cuban-American artist who has exhibited internationally with shows in Los Angeles, New York, Havana, London, Berlin, Prague, Brussels, Spain, and South Africa. He has produced dozens of TIME covers over two decades, including the award-winning “Meltdown” cover series on Donald Trump. Rodriguez invited Mark Burkhardt to TIMEPieces.
Artist Statement
Title: Spectrum
The future is diversity, of all kinds. A diverse spectrum of people, ideas, and opinions, all working together to solve the problems that we all face.
About the Artist
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.
In 1994, Rodriguez graduated with honors in painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y. 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 clients, including The New York Times, TIME, The New Yorker, and many other publications and book publishers. 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. Inspired by personal history, religious rituals, politics, memory, and nostalgia, his bold, figurative works are an examination of identity, cultural displacement, and mortality.
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