Fire And Fury

How illustrator Edel Rodriguez took aim at Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and went viral in the process

- Julia Sagar

Award-winning illustrator, artist and creative activist Edel Rodriguez came to the US from Cuba as a political refugee aged nine. He landed a job at TIME magazine soon after college, and at 26 became the youngest art director to work on TIME’s Canadian and Latin American editions, before going freelance in 2008. His clients include The New York Times, The New Yorker and many book publishers, and he won the American Society of Magazine Editors’ Cover of the Year award for his TIME Trump Meltdown cover. See more at www.illoz.com/edel.

Is Edel Rodriguez Donald Trump’s most hated artist? That was a question asked by Hollywood Reporter back in February 2017 – and the answer is most likely yes. 

The Cuban-born illustrator has unleashed a devastating visual commentary on US politics since Trump was elected president. He’s imagined Trump melting, as a baby surrounded by nuclear warheads and burning American flags. But it’s his provocative covers for German magazine Der Spiegel – Trump dressed in a KKK hood; Trump decapitating the Statue of Liberty – that have ignited public outrage. 

Rodriguez arrived in the US as a political refugee at the age of nine. He didn’t speak English, so drawing became a universal language and over two decades later his ability to transcend language and background through bold, simple graphics remains a hallmark of his work. 

At Cape Town conference Design Indaba, where we caught up with Rodriguez, he was described by Pentagram partner Michael Bierut as “an artist who reacts in real time to events we see on the news and translates them into indelible moments of social commentary”. Here, we find out how a small and personal campaign of online graphics spread to the covers of magazines before ending up at protests around the world – and how Rodriguez became part of the story.