Edel Rodriguez: How crisis inspires creativity

Cuban artist Edel Rodriguez is known for his famous Trump posters and magazine covers from the likes of Time Magazine, The New York Times, and The New Yorker among others. Rodriguez talks us through the political climate when he lived in Cuba, and how his life changed completely after his parents left the country for the United States.

With regards to his own work, "Studying fine arts, you’re not told what to do, you’re told you have to figure out what you want to paint. And that’s when you start thinking about your identity, where you come from, and where you might get ideas from, and that’s when I started thinking more about Cuba and using it in my artwork.”

“In my work, I’m very aggressive and very direct, I’m not going to sit back and accept what’s happening, I’m going to fight with what I have right now, and that’s my work”.

That’s why I do strong covers because I want people to have conversations and that’s the point of magazine covers is to start conversations and get people to deal with the facts.”

Edel Rodriguez grew up with the billboards of the Cuban revolution in his local town. “For an 8-year-old, death kept popping up. Those kinds of slogans on political campaign ads make me laugh cos there’s really not much of an option, you are either you are here, or you are going to die, there is no middle ground. I always found them pretty fascinating, even as a young kid.”

On how his work was influenced by his birthplace and upbringing, Rodriguez’ describes his father's attitudes at the time.

"My father was always against the revolution. He didn’t want anyone telling him how to behave. We started doing subversive things, he met a couple of German tourists in Havana and they gave him 2-3 foreign magazines, Brough them home. Tore out all the adverts for cards, jewellery and wallpapered the back of the house with the adverts, then told everyone in town to come and take pictures in front of the adverts.”

Overnight Rodriguez went from graphics of the Cuban revolution about having faith for a higher power, to a different kind of graphics: Having faith in rock and roll. “For a Cuban kid, going from Cuba one day, to the united states the next day, is a real culture shock”

"I became really interested in Rock and Roll, we’d make bands and create our own instruments...that was the first time I became involved in doing graphics.”

Not much has changed here he describes, “I'm still constructing and building things out of boxes, I paint, I do graphics, I do a lot of posters for Broadway shows and operas.”

Rodriguez goes on to discuss what he has become widely known for — his magazine covers. He has done over 150 covers so far. On what this represents Rodriguez says, “A magazine is a mini poster, it should be read and understood from 10-15ft away.”

At the time of the ice bucket challenge and the heightened political situation in Syria Rodriguez started to react, “I felt that we were ignoring the story far too much and I started using social media to get the message out.”

"What I found was if you put stuff out via on social media, eventually the newspapers and magazines start dealing with these topics."

Rodriguez advice to anyone wanting to use their creativity to respond to current political issues, "Use social media in a way that can put out the visual and graphics that you want to create, don’t wait for an assignment all the time, create graphics, put them out there and see what happens.”

When it came to Trump’s political campaign Rodriguez created a strategy to get his voice heard. “During that time I sensed that there was something happening with this candidate [Trump] that was a little bit crazy so I decided maybe I should create a brand, a graphic that could be easily understood by many different people, so that when I did a graphic and put it up, online people would get what I was talking about right away.”

“I would put graphics up about Trump every couple of days on Instagram and Twitter, and many times these images started going viral and spreading everywhere, just from my own feed.”

In order to attract a media response, Rodriguez explains, “What I wanted to do was find a way that Trump could be treated in a harsh strong way by the media, but they wouldn’t do that, they generally want to treat candidates fairly. I felt if I did it myself, it might spread to editors, designers, writers that I know, and maybe they would hire me to create some of this imagery for them, and low and behold it happened.”

Rodriguez got a call from the Art Director of Time Magazine in 2016, and within a matter of months, he had created two magazine covers featuring his signature iconographic picture of Trump, one being a sequel to the previous.

From there, Edel’s Trump image became prolific and the magazine covers continued to roll in. They became a big part of the visual signifiers of the medias response on the anti side of the Trump political campaign.

One image, in particular, the Der Spiegel cover which depicted Trump holding a beheaded Statue of Liberty got viral attention across America and became an image synonymous with Anti-Trump protests across the country.

Edel Rodriguez goes on to talk about the idea of risk, and freedom of speech, and shares the response he often shares when asked about the provocation in his work, and if he will ever return to America. "If I can’t do what I do, and if I can’t do what pop’s into my head and put it on the paper, I might as well not live, I might as well not be an artist. That’s what an artist does, you have an idea you put it down."