#edel rodriguez

[the-dust-jacket]

Congratulations to the 2024 Pura Belpré YA award honorees!

[graphicpolicy]

Edel Rodriguez's Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey is one hell of a true story

Edel Rodriguez's Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey is one hell of a true story. One of the best of the year #comics #comicbooks #ncbd #graphicnovel

Hailed for his iconic art on the cover of Time and on jumbotrons around the world, Edel Rodriguez is among the most prominent political artists of our age. Now for the first time, he draws his own life, revisiting his childhood in Cuba and his family’s passage on the infamous Mariel boatlift. Story: Edel RodriguezArt: Edel Rodriguez Get your copy in comic shops! To find a comic shop near you,…

[bookclub4m]

35 Non-fiction Graphic Novels by BIPOC Authors

Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.

This Place: 150 Years Retold

Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir by Ai Weiwei with Elettra Stamboulis & Gianluca Costantini

Nat Turner by Kyle Baker

The Talk by Darrin Bell

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

I’m a Wild Seed by Sharon Lee De la Cruz

Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American by Laura Gao

Stamped from the Beginning: A Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America by Joel Christian Gill and Ibram X. Kendi

Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez

The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book by Gord Hill

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob

The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Man, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito: a Graphic Memoir by Shing Yin Khor

Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook, Ryan Estrada, and Ko Hyung-Ju

In Limbo by Deb J.J. Lee

This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America by Navied Mahdavian

Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir by Pedro Martín

Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story by Sarah Myer

Steady Rollin': Preacher Kid, Black Punk and Pedaling Papa by Fred Noland

Citizen 13660 by Mine Okubo

Your Black Friend and Other Strangers by Ben Passmore

Kwändǖr by Cole Pauls

Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey by Edel Rodriguez

Power Born of Dreams: My Story is Palestine by Mohammad Sabaaneh

A First Time for Everything by Dan Santat

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi

Grandmothers, Our Grandmothers: Remembering the "Comfort Women" of World War II by Han Seong-Won

Death Threat by Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee

Palimpsest: Documents From A Korean Adoption by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom

Big Black: Stand at Attica by Frank "Big Black" Smith, Jared Reinmuth, and Améziane

Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice by Tommie Smith, Dawud Anyabwile, and Derrick Barnes

The High Desert by James Spooner

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker

Feelings by Manjit Thapp

The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson

Now Let Me Fly: A Portrait of Eugene Bullard by Ronald Wimberly and Braham Revel

[jbrookspress]

Der Spiegel, February 4, 2017. Illustration by Edel Rodriguez.

[semtituloh]

@Edel Rodriguez @studioedel

https://www.facebook.com/studioedel

[studioprinciple]

[domdupuis]

Il y a 8 ans

Illustration de Edel Rodriguez https://illoz.com/edel/

[jpkoudstaal]

🐛 Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey

A few weeks ago, I saw a talk by Edel Rodriguez at What Design Can Do and it was amazing (Read my recap here).

He also talked about his childhood under Fidel Castro’s dictatorship in Cuba and about his parents' decision to risk everything by fleeing to the U.S. in a boat when he was nine years old.

He made an amazing illustrated memoir about a part of history I knew quite little about. Highly recommended!

[bloghrexach]

🍊 … state of affairs!! Brilliant!! … 🍊

“Edel Rodriguez (born August 22, 1971, in Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban American artist, illustrator, and children's book author. Using 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.” — Wikipedia

@hrexach

[wausaupilot]

What you need to know if you're hurt while working on a Wisconsin Dairy Farm

There is no guarantee that you will be safe on any farm. But farms can take steps to protect their workers and make sure they receive the medical treatment they need after an injury.

This story was originally published by ProPublica and is being republished by permission. Click here to read the original story. by Maryam Jameel and Melissa Sanchez, Illustrations by Edel Rodriguez, special to ProPublicaProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.Series: America’s…

[graphicpolicy]

Edel Rodriguez's Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey is one hell of a true story

Edel Rodriguez's Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey is one hell of a true story #comics #comicbooks #graphicnovel #grapbicmemoir

Hailed for his iconic art on the cover of Time and on jumbotrons around the world, Edel Rodriguez is among the most prominent political artists of our age. Now for the first time, he draws his own life, revisiting his childhood in Cuba and his family’s passage on the infamous Mariel boatlift. Story: Edel RodriguezArt: Edel Rodriguez Get your copy in comic shops! To find a comic shop near you,…

[winningthesweepstakes]

The Mango Tree/La Mata de Mango by Edel Rodriguez

The Mango Tree/La Mata de Mango by Edel Rodriguez. Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2024. 9781419745867 Rating:  1-5 (5 is an excellent or a Starred review) 4 Format: Hardcover  Genre: Picture book  What did you like about the book? A wordless picture book illustrates the adventures of two boys living on an island teeming with vibrant wildlife. The illustrations, by Edel Rodriguez, an…

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: Edel Rodriguez Isn’t Afraid to Live With the Consequences by Benjamin P. Russell

By Benjamin P. Russell The political artist drew some of the most provocative images of the Trump presidency. “Worm,�� his new graphic memoir of emigrating from Cuba to the U.S., skewers the powerful once more. Published: November 8, 2023 at 05:02AM from NYT Books https://ift.tt/UnYJw7x via IFTTT

[therainchild]

“You ask me what have you taken away from me?

Well, You have taken away my sky and gave me a concrete roof and then you snatch dreams from my slumber and left me half dead on the bed. And you ask me what have you taken away from me? You took away my world from me. A world that I could travel and reach to with my thoughts. ”

A bird says to the man who caged her and calls himself her owner.

- TheRainchild

Image:- Pinterest , Edel Rodriguez

[xtruss]

How a Cuban American Illustrator Sees This Country Today

Edel Rodriguez’s new exhibition, “Apocalypso,” reflects on democracy under threat in the nation that welcomed him in his childhood.

— By Graciela Mochkofsky | May 4, 2023

Art work by Edel Rodriguez.

On a recent, gray morning, I drove with the Cuban American artist Edel Rodriguez in his blue Mini Cooper to the County College of Morris (C.C.M.), in Randolph, New Jersey, to see the latest show of his work, “Apocalypso” (a portmanteau of “apocalypse” and “calypso,” for the often satirical popular Caribbean music). Its theme, he explained, is “the state of the world in the past thirteen years”: horrible, but you can still laugh about it. Rodriguez, who is fifty-one, is best known for his striking editorial illustrations of the Trump years, many of which appeared in The New Yorker, including “After the Insurrection,” in which an American flag waves at half-mast against a dark sky, and which appeared on the cover of the magazine the week after January 6, 2021. (In 2016, a cover for Time’s “Meltdown” series, showing an orange head, with no features except for a yelling mouth and bright-yellow hair, melting away, won the American Society of Magazine Editors’ award for best magazine cover.) The show features Rodriguez’s editorial work, and also a selection of his drawings, posters, book covers, acrylic paintings, and Cuban-cigar-box assemblages.

“After the Insurrection,” which was first published as the cover of the January 18, 2021, issue of The New Yorker. © 2021 Edel Rodriguez and The New Yorker.

We spent some time looking at two drawings, in particular. Initially, they appeared to be different perspectives of the same scene. In one, a crowd of protesting men march toward the viewer, with a domed Capitol in the background; in the other, a crowd of protesting men, this time with their backs to the viewer, march toward what looks like the same building. Only when you look closer do you realize that the drawings portray two very different events. In the first, the men have beards, wear military caps, hold rifles, and wave Cuban flags; a placard reads “Patria o muerte” (“Fatherland or death”). In the second, the men wear maga hats, brandish sticks, and wave American and Confederate flags; the placard reads “Trump.” The first is a portrait of January 8, 1959, in Havana, when the Cuban Revolution deposed Fulgencio Batista and brought Fidel Castro to power; the second is of January 6, 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, on which the Cuban Capitol was modelled. The drawings are from Rodriguez’s forthcoming graphic memoir, which tells his story as a Cuban immigrant; he summarizes it as “my life between two insurrections.”

The comparison might seem like a stretch, and it is certain to provoke outrage within the Cuban American community. Ever since Castro defined his regime as Communist, the exiled community, which is still mostly resident in the Miami area, has embraced the anti-Communist cause, equating even the faintest progressive policies with the hated regime they had fled. And—ever since President John F. Kennedy refused to offer air support on the day of the botched C.I.A.-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1961—for most Cuban Americans embracing that cause has meant embracing the Republican Party. Rodriguez’s illustrations reclaim the community’s grievances, mythologies, and yearnings, and suggest that every Cuban American who opposes the island’s autocratic regime should also be anti-Trump—and these days, by extension, anti-Republican.

As Rodriguez sees it, his art is an expression of his life experience as an exile in this country. Born in 1971, he was raised among sugarcane and tobacco fields in El Gabriel, a village south of Havana. His parents—his mother was a homemaker and his father a wedding and portrait photographer—did not support the revolution, and they were looking for a way to leave for Spain when a different opportunity presented itself, in early 1980. In the midst of an economic and diplomatic crisis, the government announced that Cubans who wanted to leave the island and who had someone to pick them up at the port of Mariel, to the east of Havana, could do so. About a hundred and twenty-five thousand Cubans set off, between April and October, in what became known as the Mariel boatlift. Rodriguez, who was eight at the time, his parents, and his sister were among the Marielitos; his mother had family members in Florida, who sent a boat to get them.

Rodriguez grew up in Miami, the city that Barack Obama later called “a clear monument to what the Cuban people can build.” (The title of Rodriguez’s memoir, which will be published in November, is “Worm,” which was Fidel Castro’s term for the exiles.) For a while, Rodriguez’s father did odd jobs—street vender, painter, construction worker—then he started a small tow-truck business. Rodriguez wanted to be an artist, and, in the early nineteen-nineties, he won a scholarship to study painting at the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn; after graduating, he got a job at Time, and soon became an art director of the international edition. In 1997, he married Jennifer Roth, an artist from New Hampshire who is a granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, and the couple moved to a house in New Jersey, where he still has his studio. But, like so many émigrés, he lives in a state of nostalgia for the lost country. “To me, living in Cuba would be a dream. But I don’t think it will happen,” Rodriguez told me. “The immigrant lives like that, floating in the middle, missing his things. There is no solution. There is no perfect ending.”

Trump’s electoral triumph dramatically altered Rodriguez’s view of the country that had welcomed him in his childhood. “I never thought that I’d be fearful in this country, that I’d have to think twice about what to say,” he told me. His idea of America as the beacon of democracy was upended when, a few weeks after being sworn in, Trump imposed what became known as the “Muslim ban,” prohibiting entry to the U.S. for citizens and refugees from seven mostly Muslim countries. “My life mirrored that of many refugees who were seeking asylum in America but had suddenly been barred,” Rodriguez writes, in “Worm.” “How could a country known for welcoming immigrants suddenly turn so xenophobic?” He sensed that democracy itself was under threat, and that led to his likening of Trump to Castro. “Having lived with the propagandistic distortions of the Cuban Communist Party, I was especially attuned to the danger of the government warping reality, and the media’s failure to confront that.”

Art work by Edel Rodriguez. People on a Tank with Guns and a Cuban Flag.

In November, 2016, he drew Trump’s head as an orange meteor with a yellow tail, hurtling toward the Earth. He posted that image, and several others, on Instagram, and granted permission to anyone who wanted to print the images as posters and march with them; many people did. A few years earlier, he had been working on a series of illustrations about isis which culminated in the image of a militant brandishing a knife in one hand and his own head in the other. When the Muslim ban was announced, Rodriguez redid the image, with Trump wielding a knife in one hand, and the head of the Statue of Liberty in the other. The German magazine Der Spiegel published it on the cover in February, 2017, under the title “America First.”

An image depicting the beheading of America’s preëminent symbol of freedom by a sitting American President attracted a lot of attention, and Rodriguez was widely interviewed. Not all of the attention was positive: he was attacked on social media. A vice-president of the European Parliament found it “tasteless.” So did Rodriguez’s mother, who still lives with his father in Miami, where Rodriguez has some eighty relatives—many of them, like his mother, are conservatives. “When did you decide to become a cheap artist, criticizing the President of the United States?” she asked him. They didn’t speak for weeks.

But severed heads, and machetes, are everywhere in his work, a product, he says, of a childhood lived in the Cuban countryside. (His mother butchered chickens and goats in their yard in El Gabriel.) The show at C.C.M. includes a chicken head on a pike, painted with coffee on paper; an acrylic painting in a cigar box of the heads of four migrants piled on a sailboat; a crowned head lying on a bloody knife, on the official poster for Joel Coen’s movie of “Macbeth”; and more. “These images have been in my head my entire life. I’ve been drawing them since I was a teen-ager,” Rodriguez told me.

“Most of my work starts from where I was born,” he said at a presentation, in 2017. “The graphics of the revolution got ingrained in my head—how you communicate powerful messages . . . We were all raised to be pioneers for the revolution.” The revolution’s aesthetics, stark and maximalist, remain an obvious influence in his art. At the same time, “humor is very important,” he told me. “If you make someone laugh, they’ll slightly go to your side. If you figure out how to share your ideas with humor, you can change people’s hearts.” And this, he told me, is also a legacy from his past. “In Cuba,” he said, “you laugh at things because there is no solution. You are laughing at the ridiculousness of the whole thing.”

One thing that many people in this country can’t understand, he told me, is the growing support among members of the Latinx community for Republican candidates with strong anti-immigrant platforms—how they “can be racist, or anti-gay.” Just a few years before Trump came to power, support for conservative politicians had started to wane among Cuban Americans, leading to an almost equal number leaning Democratic as Republican—largely a result of the fact that the younger, U.S.-born generations were increasingly progressive. But, in 2016, according to exit polls, fifty-four per cent of Cuban Americans in Florida voted for Trump (compared with twenty-eight per cent of Latinxs nationwide); in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, nearly six out of ten registered Cuban American voters nationwide identified as Republican, and more than half approved of the Trump Presidency.

“Cuban voters have ebbed and flowed toward the Republican Party,” Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research, confirmed. “That trend has recently gotten stronger,” Ada Ferrer, the author of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Cuba: An American History,” told me. Ferrer, who is also Cuban American, is still trying to find “a satisfactory explanation” to why “the most recent arrivals” from the island, those who came in the past fifteen years, “have become so Trumpist.” Cuban Americans in Florida have also become strong supporters of the state’s conservative governor, Ron DeSantis. Rodriguez thinks that many “Cuban American voters will vote for anyone who speaks strongly against Communism and promises to destroy the regime back on the island. This is their top voting issue. It’s all theatre, but the Republican Party does it very well, and the Democrats fail miserably at it.”

He also believes that the center is salvageable, and that, as he told me, “this country is much more in the middle than the extremes.” His fears for democracy, however, persist. As he writes in his memoir, “The decision to leave my country changed my life, but it wasn’t my decision. I was tossed about, like a boat at sea, by the winds of history. After many years, I had come to terms with my life as an American. Now I feel at the mercy of those winds yet again.” ♦