Martin Rodriguez Jr. Brings Queer Joy to Taubman College

G

ay rodeo clowns, melted gummy bear movie theaters, pink chickens, and glitchy trash towers—the work of Martin Rodriguez Jr. (M.Arch Taubman College, 2025) is loaded with delightful contrasts, video game–inspired Easter eggs and plenty of queer joy. Rodriguez’s candy-coated color palette glides across physical modeling and digital world-building, always grounded in a deep care toward identity and accessibility—doubling down on pleasure and play. “If we see our subjects through a nonnormative lens,” he asks, “how can we apply more queerness and exuberance in spaces that erase that joy?”

Taking a page from queer culture’s relationship with archives and subtext, Rodriguez’s research often begins with a deep dive into a site’s queer past, before devising a program that both reanimates these histories and imagines worlds for possible futures. Rodeo, My Gay Rodeo (2022) draws on the legacy of the North American International Gay Rodeo Association, founded in Nevada in 1985, to unpack the 40-plus-year story of LGBTQIA+ rodeo culture. Set at the Clown Sanctuary and Performance Center in Detroit, the project brings together a diverse cohort of clowns and the many nonhuman protagonists who make a rodeo what it is. The result? A multispecies fun home with a boisterous blueprint (gym up top, barn on the bottom). 

Meanwhile, Rodriguez’s Turn into Candy! (2023) reimagines the movie theater that, with true “duck” style, embodies the saccharine stickiness of everyone’s favorite bear-shaped concession. ADA-compliant escape chutes and a rare Midjourney x marzipan collab that saw the student melting heaps of sugary sweetness and remixing it in the Midjourney machine to conjure the final form of this mixed-reality movie hall. 

What’s next in the fun factory? Berlin—a long-standing bastion of multimedia experimental art and queer expression—is an apt possibility on Rodriguez’s horizon. With an impressive grasp of game engine world-building, as seen in Gashapon and Gathering (both 2023)—which explore queer collectible culture in Japan and the gay icon of garbage, respectively—Rodriguez makes video games offer another promising medium. Wherever his work takes him, his practice embodies the joyful multiplex of queer design and the urgent need for playful, resilient, and open-ended world making today.