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Devon Rodriguez, a 27-year-old artist from the Bronx, is social media’s most adopted visible artist, with greater than 32m followers on TikTok alone. His work went viral in 2020 after he posted movies of strangers’ reactions to his sketch portraits of them on the New York Metropolis subway. Now, UTA Artist Area, the visible artwork department of Hollywood’s United Expertise Company, will host his first artwork present in New York in September—coinciding with The Armory Present—as a part of the group’s first modern artwork activation exterior its everlasting galleries in Los Angeles and Atlanta.
The pop-up exhibition, opening right now (6 September) in Chelsea, options 12 new work and 5 drawings increasing his Subway sequence, together with new works exhibiting travellers on transit methods in cities together with London, Paris and Barcelona.

Devon Rodriguez, Chambers Road, 2023 Courtesy Devon Rodriguez, UTA Positive Artwork. Photograph: Christian Nguyen
Regardless of his recognition on-line and being a New York native, Rodriguez nonetheless seems like an outsider to a lot of town’s artwork scene, he says. As an alternative of pursuing gallery illustration, Rodriguez says he turned to social media to advertise his work and studied the platforms’ algorithms to discover a technique to go viral. Since then, he has gained thousands and thousands of followers, signed a take care of UTA in August 2021, and in July met US President Joe Biden and introduced him with a sketched portrait. Nonetheless, Rodriguez says he hopes that the pop-up present will assist him set up a foothold within the artwork world.
“I’ll attempt to show myself,” Rodriguez says. “Simply because I don’t have a Yale MFA doesn’t imply I can’t present some highly effective work.”
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