TikTok Painter Devon Rodriguez Sets His Sights on a New Audience: The Art World

In 2020, Devon Rodriguez posted a video to TikTok in which his hands could be seen sketching a photorealistic portrait of a stranger on the New York City subway sitting across from him, then giving his subject the drawing and filming their reaction. It raked in 5 million views. That day Rodriguez’s follower count jumped from 1,000 to 100,000. The second video, posted the following day, garnered 21 million views and 200,000 new followers.

The day he posted that second video, Rodriguez told his grandmother, with whom he lived at the time in an apartment in the South Bronx, that he knew his life was going to change. Now, it has. 

Just a year later Rodriguez signed with United Talent Agency (UTA), and this September, the artist, who doesn’t have gallery representation or a dealer in any traditional sense, will have his first solo show at UTA Artist Space’s pop-up gallery in Chelsea.

UTA represents some of the most recognizable names in media and entertainment: Angelina Jolie, Harrison Ford, Chris Pratt, Anderson Cooper. But there is a world of talent outside of the big and small screens, and UTA, along with its competitors Creative Artists Agency and Endeavor, has been working to expand into it—or, rather, to fold those worlds into one another. 

In 2015 UTA opened its fine arts division, UTA Artist Space, in Los Angeles, as a foothold in the art world via LA’s firmly established gallery scene. An exhibition space quickly followed, and soon began hosting exhibitions by artists like Ai Weiwei and Ferrari Sheppard. (UTA isn’t alone in this art world toe-dipping: Endeavor is a majority shareholder the Frieze global art fair machine.) Last year UTA opened its second Artist Space gallery in Atlanta, another film and television industry hub whose art scene has recently grown.

With Rodriguez, and others like him, UTA is not only expanding into the world of fine arts but also acknowledging that social media, despite what top tier galleries and Ivy League educated artists think about it, can foster and even be a springboard for “legitimate” artistic talent, however one chooses to measure it.

With over 30 million followers on TikTok alone, Rodriguez has developed a following that has even extended to the outside world. Considered merely by follower count, he would be the most recognizable artist in the world. He regularly gets noticed on the street. Cab drivers tell him they love his drawings. Despite all this, he doesn’t hold much sway among galleries in Tribeca or Chelsea.

“I always thought TikTok was so cringe,” Rodriguez said during a recent studio visit. The walls and floor were covered with oil works that will be included in “Underground,” his UTA solo show. “I thought it was all about dancing girls, just a bunch of silliness. I wanted something more sophisticated.” 

His began making art he was eight years old, starting with graffiti. Since graduating from New York’s High School of Art and Design, he’s continued treating his portraiture like a day job, working eight hours a day, five days a week. In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Rodriguez admitted he rarely does anything else, to the point that he “only has, like, five friends.”

For the subway drawings, Rodriguez said he approaches his subject before he starts working, “but I don’t show them the drawing until I’m filming. The reaction is genuine.” The oil paintings in his upcoming show were done by taking candid photographs which he then used as references back in the studio.

His dedication paid off. In 2019 he was a finalist in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which is put on by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. His entry was a hyper-realistic portrait of his friend and mentor, the sculptor John Ahearn, looking off into the distance, his hands folded and brow furrowed. The two met a few years ago when Rodriguez had a show at BronxArtSpace and have been close ever since.

Then, in 2020, he decided that TikTok might be the best path to success for an artist without the Ivy League background or art world connections. So turned his attention to the app. When he wasn’t painting, he was listening to podcasts about social media, immersing himself in YouTube videos by self-proclaimed TikTok gurus, confident that his work was good enough to one day get millions of views that would lead to portrait commissions with high price tags.

He didn’t find success immediately. Rodriguez’s first videos only got between 300 and 400 views—which, he thought to himself, wasn’t nearly enough.

Throughout his research, a common thread was appealing to a mass audience. So he began painting portraits of his favorite rappers, Ye and Tyler the Creator, to up the general audience appeal. Those did better, but the numbers were still far from what he hoped to achieve.

Things started to click when he noticed that many of his virtual tutors suggested that a narrative was the best way to draw people in. “You have to have a good hook, a good middle story, and a good ending,” Rodriguez said. “And a really good incentive to watch to the end.”

He started planning out his videos, frame by frame, second by second. Rodriguez spoke about his process as though he were a tech guru readying a new product. “The algorithm boosts the videos that get watched the most, and the people scrolling are given the best of the best,” he said. “All I had to focus on is keeping people on the app, and somehow molding my work into something that’s entertainment.”

For two years, he put down his brushes and focused solely on his subway sketches and TikTok videos, and made money through the platform’s brand deals. As of today, he has 31.9 million followers. He’s sketched Joe Biden, Robert De Niro, and Steve Cohen.

All that fame, of course, doesn’t guarantee that Rodriguez will be accepted by the traditional art world, or ever get a deal with a major gallery. But perhaps that doesn’t matter as much today as it did in the past.

“As art has no intrinsic value, the discovery and positioning of artists depends on consensus, which is traditionally driven by those who can endow an artist and their practice with symbolic value—museums, curators, critics, etc.,” said Alex Glauber, president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors. “However if an artist’s audience values different markers of success—say, TikTok followers rather than inclusion in the Venice Biennale—then you’re dealing with a different artistic ecosystem, one better suited for a talent agency than a traditional gallery.”

UTA isn’t just representing Rodriguez in the art world. When he signed with UTA it was for what the industry calls “all areas.” He’s the embodiment of UTA’s belief in the power of crossover artists.

“All the normal things we might say would qualify someone to be seen as a great, respected artist in the way that we traditionally see them: Devon throws that narrative completely out the window every single time,” said Arthur Lewis, the creative director of UTA Fine Arts. “When you meet someone who has Devon’s raw capabilities, and is still so humble and honest about what he does, and at the same time, is so incredibly talented, it’s hard to ignore.”

Lewis, an ARTnews Top 200 collector, has been actively working introduce Rodriguez to the intricacies art world and vice versa. They went to Art Basel together, and they’ve attended openings in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Through Lewis, Rodriguez has also been introduced to major collectors. Rodriguez seems to be catching on quickly. When asked, neither he nor Lewis would say exactly who he’d been introduced to, or if those collectors bought any of his works.

“I want them to get to know him and get him indoctrinated into this world, because it is still a very different landscape,” Lewis said. “It’s about showing him how it works so he understands all of the parts, but still allowing him to do what he does best—to go on TikTok, create excitement.”

“Underground,” which opens September 6 at a UTA Artist’s Space pop-up in Chelsea, is an extension of the work that brought him social media fame, with subjects plucked not only from the New York subway system but also the London Underground and metros in Barcelona and Paris. The creative agency PlayLab designed the sections of the pop-up to take on an MTA aesthetic, with abstracted subway cars and LED trains chugging by.

The show could serve as a barometer for how successful UTA will be in its plan to bring together all the worlds of entertainment under one grand umbrella. Lewis said, “From its inception, I think the idea behind the Artist Space was always to make sure that there was some form of crossover. It’s recognizing that the fine arts is just another one of those beautiful extensions that people could move into our move across as they explored other things.”