Among the fiercest political graphics that appeared during the Trump Administration were Edel Rodriguez’s covers for Time magazine and the weekly German magazine Der Spiegel. In the New Jersey artist’s illustrations, the president becomes a howling menace with caution orange skin and flaming yellow hair. In Rodriguez’s April 2017 cover for Der Spiegel, Trump waves a bloody machete in one hand and holds up the bleeding, decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty with the other.
“The enemies of the people, quotes about the media, encouraging audience members to beat other people up—in the U.S., it was kind of entertainment. It was, ‘Oh, that’s crazy,’ and I was, like, ‘No, this is exactly what has happened in Cuba, in Venezuela, at times in Germany during World War II,” Rodriguez told The New York Times in 2023. “It works on you in a very slow way, and it’s appealing to a lot of people.”
The exhibition “Undercurrents” on view at de Menil Gallery at Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts, from Jan. 14 to April 14, 2024, surveys Rodriguez’s drawings and paintings, 30 book covers, 21 magazine illustrations, and 14 designs for theatrical posters that he’s created since 1995. He criticizes Trump, racism, sexism. He draws family and friends. He experiments to keep from getting in a stylistic rut. His style ranges from lyrical cubism to flat, blunt graphics. Original acrylic paintings on paper for the covers of several books by Chinua Achebe, including “Things Fall Apart,” reveal that Rodriguez often works two or three times bigger than the size at which the book will be printed.
Rodriguez, who was born in Cuba in 1971 and was an art director at Time from 1994 to 2008, often returns to images of skulls, women and chickens in scratched, worn-looking reds, blacks, whites and golds. “Everything is red in Cuba” Rodriguez told Publishers Weekly in 2023. “…For a long time, I didn’t use red because it was commie red. Then, I wondered, ‘Why does a dictatorship have the right to own colors?’ I started using it constantly.”
The exhibition features five pages from Rodriguez’s 2023 graphic memoir “Worm,” which recounts his childhood in Fidel Castro’s Cuba; his family’s immigration to Miami in 1980 as part of the Mariel boat lift; his life as a designer and illustrator today based in Mount Tabor, New Jersey; and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol.
“I don’t think most Americans realize what a coup is, or a coup attempt,” Rodriguez told the Guardian in 2023, “how dangerous it is.”
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