WORM: DRAWING EXILE, DEFENDING DEMOCRACY
FEATURING: EDEL RODRIGUEZ
Before he was "America's Illustrator in Chief," before his TIME covers of a melting Trump became the defining images of a political era, Edel Rodriguez was a nine-year-old boy on a farm outside Havana, labeled a "worm" by the only government he had ever known. That label, "gusano," was Fidel Castro's word for the 125,000 Cubans who fled during the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Rodriguez took it back. He made it the title of his acclaimed graphic memoir, WORM: A Cuban American Odyssey, and turned a slur into a testament.
SE CLT is proud to feature the work of Edel Rodriguez as a part of the second annual Fall of Freedom, a national movement using creative work to answer authoritarianism with resistance, memory, and beauty.
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About the artist:
Edel Rodriguez is globally recognized for his political illustrations in TIME Magazine, The New Yorker, the New York Times, and other major publications. His work has been exhibited internationally with shows in Los Angeles, Toronto, New York, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Spain. Inspired by personal history, religious rituals, politics, memory, and nostalgia, his bold, figurative works are an examination of identity, cultural displacement, and mortality.
About Fall of Freedom:
Fall of Freedom returns for its second year — expanding the national call to creative resistance. FoF is an open instigation to artists, venues and institutions across all disciplines to put your work in the world on October 2nd, 3rd, & 4th, countering fascist repression and censorship with joyful communities of defiant creativity. Art matters. Courage is contagious.