When artist Devon Rodriguez appeared on my computer screen, he was sitting in front of the hunter green wall of a Starbucks, sipping a chai latte with white wires hanging from his ears and tattoos of red or yellow flowers peeking out above the collar of his black t-shirt. He had escaped the noisy buzz of his Murray Hill studio, where members of his team were readying promotional materials for his new Paris print.
For Rodriguez, each new day is wildly different. On one, he’s in Detroit across from Oprah Winfrey; on the next, he’s waiting to board a flight to Paris. On another, he might be handing a drawing to Ben Affleck or Joe Biden or a stranger on the street. And tens of millions are following along: 34.1 million on TikTok, 12.6 million on YouTube and 9.5 million on Instagram. He’s arguably the most-followed contemporary artist in the world, though his 2023 pop-up solo show “Underground” at New York City’s Highline Nine was his first gallery exhibition.
‘The only thing I had’: a turbulent upbringing
In his teens, Rodriguez never visited museums or galleries. He would start the day passing through a metal detector at the doors of Samuel Gompers High School, tapping his toes with impatience, because the queue routinely made him twenty minutes late to class. “It almost felt like a jail,” Rodriguez told Observer. “I didn’t even really understand how poor I really was, you know? I just thought that was normal, because that’s what I lived in.”
He came home from long, chaotic school days to a toxic household, funded by welfare and headed by an abusive mother. After hours, he’d sleuth online, navigating MySpace and Facebook in search of his absent father, Carlos, but the name’s popularity hindered his efforts.
He heard stories about his father, a talented tattoo artist and former Marine with profiles published in magazines. Rodriguez lacked street cred in the Bronx—“I wasn’t a thug or, you know, that kind of guy”—but his paternity endowed him with some clout, as men bedecked in sleeves of his father’s work would respect him by association. “My mom would say, ‘What’s wrong with you? He left you. Why do you want to meet him so bad?’”
Rodriguez’s sister had similar reservations about meeting their father, but he never held any resentment—only the desire and a hope to one day be a part of his life. He eventually located his father, sustaining a years-long phone relationship before meeting him in Miami. He gave Rodriguez a tattoo—a colorful Japanese mask—which ended up being the last tattoo he’d give before passing away two months later from alcoholism.
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Carlos had his own trauma and fathered eighteen children during a “wild,” “always-on-the-run” life that took him from the Bronx to Miami to San Diego. He’d leave when the mothers of his children would find him in whichever tattoo parlor he currently worked at to demand child support.
But before Rodriguez found any of that out, he was a teenager in the Bronx, looking forward to art classes with his teacher Jeremy Harper as his outlet. “I always had a pencil in my hand. It was all I really cared about, and it was the only thing that I really had that I was proud of,” he said. His art journey began with graffiti, but after tagging walls got him arrested at 14 years old, he turned to portraits. Harper introduced him to sketching passengers on the subway as a method of practicing portraiture. And there was no better place to practice than New York, a city of so much diversity. “Everyone has different eyes, different noses, different shapes, different everything.” Eventually, he’d start practicing on the 6 train during his commute; he never could have anticipated just how much sketching people on the subway would change his life.
Rodriguez’s rise to fame: the subway sketches
A man slumps against an orange seat, his backpack looped around his forearm, phone in hand, thumb mindlessly scrolling. He sports a red shirt, a dark hat and the then-omnipresent blue surgical mask. The video pans down to a small sketchbook on Rodriguez’s lap. One hand videos, as the other effortlessly creates large shapes and then small scratches and shadows with a pencil. He is surreptitiously drawing the man across from him.
Rodriguez uploaded that video in August 2020. When he checked later that day, the clip had accumulated five million views on TikTok. “I went from no followers to 100,000 from that one video. And I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God. This is crazy,’” he said. But it must be a fluke, he thought. He repeated the same exercise the following day and posted it: 21 million views.
Though he couldn’t believe the traction his videos were getting, his virality was no accident. He said he’d listen to podcasts and YouTube videos all about algorithms and how to blow up on social media because he saw it as his ticket to a better life.
When Rodriguez began to show his portraits to their subjects with a sheepish “I drew you,” his popularity skyrocketed. The added reveal gave the videos shock value but also made them more relatable. These were ordinary people—it could be any one of us, any one of his millions of viewers—being seen, even if the sketch was just a snapshot of one moment, the subject’s commute to work, or school, or wherever the train bore them. The notion is at once beautifully intimate and devastatingly ephemeral. People loved it.
His rise to stardom happened quickly in part because, as Rodriguez tells it, TikTok was less saturated with creators in 2020. During the pandemic, people crowded onto the app, though most were not trying to gain a following. “I was just in on the right time,” he said. “And every day: reaction video, reaction video, reaction video. Some days would be so big, I’d get 200K followers, 300K followers. That’s how I built it up so, so quickly.”
And he was off.
‘Out of place’ in a new space
Though the subway sketches introduced Rodriguez to the world, he had been honing his technical skills since his childhood and throughout his teens, which sometimes meant spending five days straight painting the same nude model. He was accepted to the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan after his second time applying. By 2012, he’d traded the South Bronx for Midtown, where it seemed like everyone participated in the high-brow art scene of Chelsea galleries, Thursday night openings and boujee wine rendezvous. “I would go, and I just felt so out of place. I felt so undereducated. I felt like I didn’t belong, like I was from a different part of society,” he said. “I didn’t really get it.”
It didn’t help that his artistic interests weren’t in vogue. He found joy in traditional portraiture and realism, but that style was widely eschewed in the art world in favor of the conceptual and abstract works that dominated the zeitgeist. He was told repeatedly that his figurative preferences belonged to an outdated, academic style. Still, Rodriguez refused to conform to fit into a world that he felt wouldn’t welcome him anyway. And as it turned out, he didn’t have to.
He grew up on the internet, creating a MySpace profile when he was just 10 years old. Social media was his playground if the gallery scene wasn’t. “It was all me not being in tune with the gallery world, and being so in tune with the social media world and dedicated to my art—all that, perfect place, perfect time, all that as a mix just created this thing where I didn’t need to pay attention to the galleries.”
By 2015, he was bringing in cash on portrait commissions. By 2018, he was getting interviewed for prestigious publications. He cared less about being embraced by the gatekeeping art world and more about building a clientele that believed in the work he loved to do, just like his supportive grandmother had believed in him, spending her savings on art materials for him. Years later, 60 million followers across platforms are cheering him on, and his work has been shown in galleries.
These days, much of Rodriguez’s content comes from his street interviews. He’ll ask the sitter—sometimes an ordinary, unique and color-clad individual, sometimes a celebrity—questions about their lives as he sketches their portrait, often incorporating elements of their story in the background of the image. But he usually begins these videos by asking the sitter about their biggest dreams, so I ended our conversation with the same question.
“Honestly, I don’t even know, because I feel like I already kind of surpassed all my dreams,” he said with a smile. “I’ve been too busy to even think of new ones.”
