When artist Devon Rodriguez appeared on my computer screen, he sat in front of the Starbucks Hunter green wall, latte, with tattoos of white silk, red or yellow flowers hanging from white wires peeking over his black T-shirt. He escaped the noisy buzz of the Lower East Side studio, and his team members were preparing promotional materials for his new Paris print.
For Rodriguez, every new day is very different. On the one hand, he is in Detroit opposite Oprah Winfrey. Next, he is waiting for a flight to Paris. On another side, he might hand over the painting to Ben Affleck or Joe Biden or a stranger on the street. It lasted tens of millions, with 34.1 million on Tiktok, 12.6 million on YouTube and 9.5 million on Instagram. It can be said that he is the most important contemporary artist in the world. However, his pop-up solo exhibition “Underground” at Highline 9 in New York City was his first gallery exhibition.
“The only thing I have”: a turbulent growth experience
Rodriguez never visited a museum or gallery as a teenager. He will start the day passing through the metal detector on the door of Samuel Gompers High School because of toes impatient, as the queues usually make him twenty minutes late. “It almost feels like prison,” Rodriguez told the observer. “I don't even know much about my real poverty, you know? I just think that's normal because that's what I live in.”
He returned home from a long and chaotic school days to a toxic family, funded by welfare and led by abusive mother. After get off work, he detects and navigates online Myspace and Facebook search for his absent father, Carlos, but the popularity of the name has hampered his efforts.
He heard stories about his father, a talented tattoo artist and former Marines, and published his profile in a magazine. Rodriguez lacks street credibility in the Bronx – “I'm not a thug, or, you know that kind of person” – but his parent-child relationship gives him some influence because men will respect him when they lie in the sleeves of their father's work. “My mom would say, 'What's wrong with you? He left you. Why do you want to see him so badly?''
Rodriguez's sister also had similar reservations about meeting his father, but he never held any resentment – only the desire and hope to be a part of his life one day. He eventually found his father, and he maintained a telephone relationship for years before San Diego met him. He gave Rodriguez a tattoo – a colorful Japanese mask – and it ended up being the last one he gave before he died of alcoholism two months later.
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Carlos has his own trauma, having 18 children in a “wild” and “always running” life, which brought him from the Bronx to Miami to San Diego. When his child's mother is in which tattoo shop he currently works to ask for child support, he will leave.
But before Rodriguez found anything, he was a teenager in the Bronx, looking forward to being his outlet with his teacher Jeremy Harper. “I've always had a pencil in my hand. It's everything I really care about, and it's the only thing I'm really proud of,” he said. His artistic journey began with graffiti, but after marking the walls led him to arrest at the age of 14, he turned to portraits. Harper introduced him to passengers on the subway to practice portraiture. There is no better place than the practice place in New York. “Everyone has different eyes, different noses, different shapes, different everything.” Finally, he would start practicing on six trains during get off work. He could never have expected how many sketches would change his life on the subway.
Rodriguez's reputation: subway sketch
A man fell on an orange seat with his backpack around his forearm, holding his cell phone in his hand, and his thumb rolling unconsciously. He wore a red shirt, a dark hat and then-blue surgical mask. The video places the small sketchbook on Rodriguez's legs. One hand video, the other effortlessly creates huge shapes and then uses pencil to scratch and shadow. He secretly attracted the man from him.
Rodriguez uploaded the video in August 2020. When checked later that day, the clip amassed 5 million views on Tiktok. “From that video, I didn't go from no followers to 100,000. I remember thinking, 'Oh my god. It's crazy.'” he said. He thought, but it must be a kind of fluorine. He repeated the same exercise the next day and posted it: 21 million views.
Although he couldn't believe the traction he gained from his videos, his virus was not accidental. He said he would listen to podcasts and YouTube videos about algorithms and how they explode on social media because he saw it as his ticket.
His popularity soared when Rodriguez started to show his portrait to their subject with the sheepish “I attract you.” Additional revelations make video vibrating values, but also make them more relevant. These are ordinary people–anyone of us, any of his millions of viewers can Seeeven if the sketch is just a snapshot of a moment, the subjects’ commute to work or school, or the train is all emitted. The concept is immediately intimate and devastating. People love it.
His rise to stars happened quickly, partly because, as Rodriguez told it, Tiktok was less saturated to creators in 2020. During the pandemic, people have squeezed into the app, although most people are not trying to gain followers. “I'm at the right time,” he said. “Everyday: reaction video, reaction video, reaction video. Some days will be big, and I'll get 200k followers, 3 million followers. That's how I built it, so so quickly.”
He left.
“Inappropriate” in the new space
Although subway sketches introduce Rodriguez to the world, he has been honing his technical skills as a teenager since he was a child, which sometimes means spending five days painting the same nude models. After his second application, he was admitted to Art and Design in Manhattan. By 2012, he had traded South Bronx to Midtown, where everyone seemed to be attending the Chelsea Gallery’s high-brow art scene, Thursday night’s opening and Boujee Wine Rendezvous. “I'll leave, I just feel inappropriate. I feel educated. I don't feel like I belong to me, like I'm from another part of society,” he said. “I don't really understand.”
It doesn't help that his artistic interests are not popular. He found joy in traditional portraiture and realism, but this style was widely avoided in the art world, and preferred concepts and abstract works that dominated the spirit of the times. He was repeatedly told that his symbolic preferences belonged to an outdated academic style. Despite this, Rodriguez refused to comply with a world that he felt was not welcomed. It turns out that he doesn't have to.
He grew up on the internet and created a Myspace profile when he was 10 years old. If it weren't for the gallery scene, social media would be his playground. “It’s me no Keep in line with the gallery world and so Align with the social media world and dedicated to my art – all of this, the perfect place, the perfect time, all of which create something I don't need to focus on the gallery. ”
By 2015, he was bringing cash from the Portrait Commission. By 2018, he had interviewed with famous publications. He doesn't care about being embraced by the gatekeeper art world, but rather building a client who believes in the work he likes to do, just as his supportive grandmother believed in him, spending her savings for him. A few years later, 60 million followers from across the platform are cheering him on and His work has been shown in the gallery.
These days, most of Rodriguez's content comes from his street interviews. He would ask the babysitter – sometimes a common, unique and colored individual, sometimes a celebrity – about their lives, when he sketches their portraits, often bringing elements of their stories into the context of images. But he usually starts these videos by asking the babysitters about their biggest dreams, so I ended the conversation with the same question.
He smiled and said, “I don't even know, to be honest, because I feel like I've surpassed all my dreams.” “I've been busy and don't even want to think of new ones.”
