Edel Rodriguez

In early 2018, Rodriguez met U2's stage designer, Es Devlin at the Design Indaba Conference in Cape Town, South Africa. An upcoming U2 tour, eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE, was still being developed at that time and Rodriguez was brought in to create 40 works of art that would be shown prominently during the pre-show and prior to the second act of the performance. His illustrations incorporated text from the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, with texts such as "When the government becomes destructive it is the right of the people to abolish it" and slogans such as "Poverty Is Sexist" and "Educate a girl, empower a community." They also covered social issues such as immigration, gun violence, and free speech with signs that read, "Refugees Welcome", and "Fight Back!".

For the February 4, 2017 issue of Der Spiegel, Rodriguez's cover image depicting President Donald Trump holding the Statue of Liberty's severed head in one hand and a knife in the other, with the cover title America First[3] generated news coverage in such publications as The Washington Post, The Guardian, Newsweek and other news outlets. The cover image was described as tasteless by vice-president of the European Parliament, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff and defended by Der Spiegel editor-in-chief Klaus Brinkbaeumer, who commented that he was surprised by the impact of the illustration.

The August 28th, 2017 issue of Time Magazine, titled Hate in America focused on a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in the death of 2 police officers and a 32 year old women. Illustrated by Rodriguez [4], the cover art, depicting a protester giving a Nazi salute while draped in an American flag was covered in the news by CNN and Market Watch as well as other media outlets.

For the 2016 August 22 issue of Time, editor-in-chief Nancy Gibbs focused their cover on Republican Donald Trump's presidential campaign, with the cover title Meltdown and DW Pine commissioned Rodriguez for the cover illustration. The cover appeared on various news broadcasts, including PBS and MSNBC, as well as generating news coverage in such magazines and newspapers as The Washington Post and People

For the 2015 February 8 issue of Newsweek, the cover story by Nina Burleigh was illustrated by Rodriguez. The cover image, portraying a woman with her skirt being lifted up by a computer cursor created controversy, with some calling it a faceless and sexualized symbol of women. The cover image also created what NBC News described as a "firestorm" on Twitter, after the website Jezebel derided the illustration. Others considered the cover image appropriate to the subject matter of the article. Burleigh, the author of the article on which the illustration was based described the critical comments as petty. On PBS, Rodriguez defended the work saying "it’s not sexist, it depicts the ugliness of sexism".

In 1994 Rodriguez began work as an art director for Time magazine. At 26, Rodriguez was the youngest art director to ever work on Time's Canadian and Latin American editions. He held this position until 2008, when he began dedicating all of his time to art and commercial illustration. While working at Time, Rodriguez produced a significant amount of illustration work, the majority of which was done in the evenings. Some of the more memorable commercial works produced during this period were his June 27, 2005 Time magazine cover for China's New Revolution [1] in which Mao Zedong is depicted wearing Louis Vuitton and his May/June 2006 cover for Communication Arts [2] depicting Che Guevara wearing a Nike logo and Apple headphones. The Time cover depicting Mao Zedong was later used in 2009 as the cover for Lürzer's 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide.

In 2005, the U.S. Postal Service released the Cha-Cha-Cha stamp, illustrated by Rodriguez.

After graduation from High School, Rodriguez declined a full scholarship to The University of Miami and instead attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. While a student at Pratt, Rodriguez interned at Spy magazine, MTV and Penguin Books. After graduating from Pratt with honors and earning a BFA on a full scholarship in painting. Rodriguez went on to earn a M.F.A. from Hunter College in 1998.

In 1991, Rodriguez met Jennifer Roth;the two married in 1997.

Until the age of 9, Rodriguez lived in the Cuban countryside town of El Gabriel. In an interview conducted by Yuko Shimizu, Rodriguez described his earliest visual influences as military, revolutionary and nationalist imagery. In 1980 Rodriguez emigrated to the United States with his father, Cesareo Rodriguez mother, Coralia Rodriguez and sister Irma as one of the thousands of Cubans who took part in the Mariel boatlift. His family of four arrived in Key West and as the Cuban government had taken possession of the families home, car, furniture and even clothes, the Rodriguez family had little to start a new life with. The family moved in with relatives in Miami, Florida where Edel's father established a trucking business. Within a couple of years of arriving in the United States, Rodriguez had mastered the language to the point that he became a Spelling Bee champion. Rodriguez graduated from Hialeah-Miami Lakes High School in 1990.

Edel Rodriguez (born August 22, 1971 in Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban American artist, illustrator, and children's book author. He uses a variety of materials, his work ranges from conceptual to portraiture and landscape. Socialist propaganda and western advertising, island culture and contemporary city life, are all aspects of his life that inform his work.