Worm Book Release with Edel Rodriguez & Chip Kidd
6:30–8pm
Poster House is pleased to host “America’s illustrator-in-chief,” Edel Rodriguez, in conversation with graphic designer and writer, Chip Kidd, for a wide-ranging conversation on Rodriguez’s new graphic memoir Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey. Worm is available for purchase at the Poster House Shop; book signing to follow.
Through vivid, stirring art, Worm tells the story of a boyhood in the midst of the Cold War, a family’s displacement in exile, and their tenacious longing for those they left behind. It also recounts the coming-of-age of an artist and activist, who, witnessing America’s turn from democracy to extremism, struggles to differentiate his adoptive country from the dictatorship he fled. Confronting questions of patriotism and the liminal nature of belonging, Edel Rodriguez ultimately celebrates the immigrants, maligned and overlooked, who guard and invigorate American freedom.
Edel Rodriguez is a Cuban American artist who has exhibited internationally with shows in Los Angeles, New York, London, Prague, Berlin, La Paz 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.
Chip Kidd is a graphic designer and writer in New York City. As editor-at-large for graphic novels for Pantheon books, he has worked with some of the best artists in the business, including Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Alex Ross, Michael Cho, Charles Burns, Anita Kunz, and Neil Gaiman, among many others. He is presently writing an Avengers graphic novel for the Abrams Marvel Arts book imprint.