By Jessica Gelt and Ashley Lee

“CUT — Six Artists on the Edge”
This group exhibition — featuring works by David Adey, David Daigle, Sherin Guirguis, Fran Siegel, Edra Soto and Samira Yamin — is all about the various methods of cutting as methods of creation and transformation of physical objects: tearing, slicing, carving, drilling, laser cutting and more. 

By Jesse James

This year’s program, titled Work in Progress, emphasizes the beauty of the artistic journey itself, shedding light on the process of creation rather than just the final product. Over the last 50 years, the residency has welcomed over 500 artists to its fold, featuring Edra Soto. By merging the creativity of the artists with the technical prowess of Kohler’s artisans, the residency has become a space for innovation, where participants can experiment with new ideas, stretch their skills, and find inspiration in the craftsmanship of industry.

By Magrira 

Edra Soto's latest piece, “Graft,” is on display at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park at 60th Street and 5th Avenue, until Aug. 24, 2025. This series of installations is based on rejas, wrought iron screens frequently seen outside homes in Puerto Rico. These screens, often featuring repeating geometric motifs, trace back to West Africa’s Yoruba symbol systems, contrasting the Spanish architecture celebrated in official Puerto Rican tourism. “Graft” investigates how Puerto Rican cultural memory often masks the island’s Black heritage as folklore.

By Stephanie Casanova

After winning an award from The Joyce Foundation, The Sculpture Center is partnering with artist Edra Soto, who will create the bus shelter and an indoor gallery exhibition next year. The La Distancia (The Distance) project will address themes of displacement, identity and culture. The indoor exhibition will be on display in May and June. The permanent bus shelter sculpture will be installed in May. 

NEW YORK, NY.- Public Art Fund presents Edra Soto: Graft, the latest iteration in an ongoing series of architectural interventions, in an exhibition at Central Park. With her first large-scale public art commission in New York City, Soto continues her sculptural practice of using rejas, the patterned wrought iron screen-like gates ubiquitous in post-war Puerto Rican architecture, to create a monument to lower and middle-class Puerto Rican communities.

By Aaron Ginsburg

Artist Edra Soto’s first large-scale work in New York City pays tribute to the architectural legacy of Puerto Rico. Presented by the Public Art Fund, “Edra Soto: Graft” draws inspiration from rejas, the wrought iron gates often found outside homes in Puerto Rico, and serves as a monument to lower and middle-class Puerto Rican communities. The exhibition will be on view at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park at 60th Street and 5th Avenue from September 5 through August 24, 2025.

By Emily Rosca

AURORA, IL — It may not be springtime, but Aurora is in bloom thanks to a new mural and sculpture garden on Downer Place in the downtown area. Called "Aurora In Bloom," the mural depicts flowers from in and around Aurora. The blooms adorn the side of a brick building adjacent to five free-standing sculptures, called "Graft," designed by Chicago artist Edra Soto.

By Coco Picard

In 2012, Edra Soto began Graft, an ongoing series inspired by the rejas of Puerto Rico’s homes, windows, porches, and fences, which allow the circulation of air while delineating public and private space. Soto’s resulting architectural interventions not only transplant her native Puerto Rican identity onto U.S. territories but further highlight how cultural identity and the architectures upon which we rely are situated within a dynamic web of historic and contemporary relationships.

How can photography help people better understand their environment amidst an era of rapid development and climate change? In the final episode of Widening the Lens, artists Edra Soto, Victoria Sambunaris, and Dionne Lee discuss how photography helps them bear witness to the constantly changing American landscape, and the ways in which art can help us move forward at this critical juncture.

Public Art Fund will debut Edra Soto's new interactive metal and terrazzo sculptural works at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, Engage Projects relays. Her first large-scale public art commission in New York City, Soto's Public Art Fund project marks the next iteration of her "Graft" series. 

Griselda Rosas’s large mixed media works on paper, representing Los Angeles gallery Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, were among the fair’s show stoppers. Rosas somehow combines the textures of paint with densely stitched or embroidered passages. The pieces are moody, atmospheric, full of surprises, and downright mystical in the way that they usher thread into the shimmery realm of fabulist landscapes. The artist, based in Tijuana and San Diego, straddles the US-Mexico border, and her stitching on paper can echo the back and forth, coming and going, of migration. In the far edge of one piece is a tear Rosas sutured. The divide is a wound; the wound needs repair. 

The John Michael Kohler Arts Center celebrates 50 years of the Arts/Industry residency program in 2024 with 12 new artists.  Sharif Bey, Shae Bishop, Justin Favela, Cathy Hsiao, Sahar Khoury, Mary Anne Kluth, Lauren Mabry, Harold Mendez, Martha Poggioli, Lee Emma Running, Edra Soto and Ger Xiong/Ntxawg Xyooj were all selected for the 2024 residency.

The organizers of any biennial have to strike a balance between serving the expectations of visitors, participating artists and donors on the one hand and, on the other, the needs of the neighborhoods that host the installations. The latest iteration of the Chicago Architecture Biennial — the fifth since it began in 2015 — leans hard, and sometimes tumbles, in the second direction.

On a sliver of the Floating Museum’s studio property, the artist Edra Soto installed “La Distancia / The Distance,” a remarkable bus shelter made of ornamented concrete, its patterns inspired by Puerto Rican and West African designs, just feet from a Chicago Transit Authority bus stop. According to Majeed, the original plan had been to work with the C.T.A. to build the shelter in the public right of way.

While the Cultural Center’s exhibition feels so full that it becomes difficult to comprehend how all 51 pieces fit together, CAB’s installations on the south side offer respite and meaning. An installation by local artist Edra Soto, located at 75th and Ellis Avenue, is a small concrete shelter; its modern design hearkens back to decorative architecture from Soto’s native Puerto Rico. Titled La Distancia, the structure speaks to diasporic traditions but also importantly functions as a much-needed bus shelter for the 4 and 79 buses.

Chicago-based Puerto Rican artist Edra Soto is participating in the festival for the first time this year. Her work over the past decade has focused on her experiences with migration and socioeconomic and cultural oppression. Her collaboration with poet Adalber Salas Hernández, which will be displayed during the live magazine show, combines her artwork and videography on life inside the home with a poem Hernández crafted. 

The exhibition showcases the works of eight multigenerational artists whose pieces speak to pre-Hispanic and colonial heritage while referring to different migrations in and from Latin America. Encompassing a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, installation and video, the artworks grapple with issues such as modernity, coloniality, patriarchy and gender.  Artists in the exhibition give voice to peripheral communities by presenting traditional materials and techniques in combination with new technologies and methods of making, which encourage viewers to form new ways of seeing the past in order to better understand the present. 

For Chicago-based, Puerto Rican–born artist Edra Soto, home is a psychic, geographic place as well as a locus for gathering and community. It is also a political space that defines who we are as civic and social beings. The complex relationships between citizenship and migration, displacement and belonging, inform the impressive suite of sculptural installations comprising “Destination/El Destino: A Decade of GRAFT,” an unconventional survey celebrating ten years of this ongoing project by Soto.

Today more than 100,000 Puerto Ricans call Chicago home, and the Museum of Contemporary Art pays homage to that community with a new exhibition.  Visual artist Edra Soto is known for her exploration of Puerto Rican vernacular architecture, which is reflective of the island’s history, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago is amplifying her work and the work of others for Hispanic Heritage Month.

Episode No. 619 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Edra Soto and José Lerma.  Soto and Lerma are among the 18 artists featured in “entre horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The exhibition examines the artistic genealogies and social justice movements that connect Puerto Rico with Chicago, which is home to third-largest mainland population of Puerto Ricans. “entre horizontes” was curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates with Iris Colburn. 

Central Wharf Park in Boston is set to welcome an extraordinary public art experience this September: Edra Soto's Graft. Graft is guest-curated by Pedro Alonzo with Now + There, a Boston-based public art non-profit delivering engaging installations throughout the city.

Edra Soto's GRAFT series bus shelter has been acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. This project, which has seen multiple incarnations, including at EXPO Chicago 2022, a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, as well as her solo exhibition "La Distancia" at ENGAGE Projects, is now part of the MCA's permanent collection. 

Chicago's summer is always full of art and creativity. It is also a season of activism and advocacy. Destination/El Destino: A Decade of GRAFT offers a mid-project survey of the GRAFT series to date by artist Edra Soto. 

Chicago-based artist Edra Soto created a series of work about her homeland, Puerto Rico, and her migration to her adopted hometown. Soto makes temporary public sculptures that evoke island culture and architecture. Her artwork has been exhibited in Brazil, Cuba and the Whitney Museum in New York City.  At Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center, the big garage doors are open, welcoming visitors into Soto’s immersive structure.

Edra Soto's sculptures are lovely places to be inside: dappled light shines through walls made of orante blocks or windows covered in decorative screens, casting shapely shadows that mingle with the free-flowing breeze. There might be a bench to sit on, a table to play dominoes at, or an architectural essay to read. If you're really lucky, a slice of pineapple upside-down cake or some spam-valveeta-pimiento sandwiches will be on offer.

The show was borne of a collaboration between the independent art spaces The Franklin, The Mayfield, and HPAC. Artists Edra Soto, Madeleine Aguilar, and Alberto Aguilar, founders of the first two aforementioned spaces, all hold a passion for the material of the ordinary. This joy in turn catalyzed the scent, sound, and images of strength that adorn HPAC’s walls.

The Chicago Architecture Biennial, a nonprofit that explores innovative ideas and the future of design, has announced the participants scheduled to showcase their work in the fifth edition of the exhibition. This year’s event, entitled This is Rehearsal, is scheduled to run from Sept. 21 to Jan. 2, 2024, and will welcome more than 70 worldwide artists, architects, and designers presenting their work at sites across the Chicago metropolitan area.

Two of today’s leading conceptual sculptors are also among the fellows: Edra Soto, whose interventions look at how Puerto Rican domestic architecture has been exported the world over. 

The Hyde Park Art Center and Chicago-based artist Edra Soto describe the artist’s show, “Destination/El Destino: A Decade of Graft” as a mid-project survey: Soto is definitely not finished with the series of work that is the show’s subject. The title references the transplantation, or grafting, of a piece of the artist’s Puerto Rican heritage onto her Chicago home.

Puerto Rican artist, educator and community organizer Edra Soto’s largest exhibit to date is all the buzz at the Hyde Park Art Center. Showcasing her large-scale GRAFT series featuring sculptures that blend elements of Afro-diasporic architecture, accompanied by documentary photographs and drawings that counter colonial narratives, Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT illuminates the past through her work, highlighting the enslaved sub-Saharan African population’s influence on Puerto Rican architecture.

The Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., Chicago, mounts the largest solo exhibition to date of works by Puerto Rican artist and educator Edra Soto. "Destination/El Destino: A Decade of Graft" consists of large-scale sculptures, photographs, drawings and games and includes her latest work, which features more than 500 tin stars hand-tooled by the artist. 

Elsewhere, Edra Soto presents an iteration of her ongoing series, “GRAFT,” now in its tenth year. A red-painted architectural intervention based on cast-iron fences seen throughout Puerto Rico, the piece contains images of the sky or the trees that are meant to “show the transformation of the landscape” after Maria as opposed to more graphic images of devastation and destruction, she said. “When the hurricane happened, that was probably the most depressing time of my life living in Puerto Rico. I felt in my bones that it was something that I needed to document.”

A sculpture by Edra Soto invites us to reconsider how we look at images of destruction. As part of her ongoing project GRAFT (2022-), the artist recreates Puerto Rican quiebrasoles – literally “break the sun” – latticed concrete screens that are ubiquitous features of vernacular architecture on the island. 

Devoted readers of this column might remember a short item about artist Edra Soto a few months back around her exhibition at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art in Glen Ellyn, which mentioned her local ubiquity, with an installation in Millennium Park and participation in prominent group projects at the Chicago Botanic Garden and with the dance troupe The Seldoms. Both bolstering the item's argument and undercutting its newsworthiness, a press release hit my inbox two days later announcing Soto's "largest solo exhibition to date," at the Hyde Park Art Center, opening this week.

Puerto Rican artist, educator and community organizer Edra Soto’s forthcoming largest exhibit to date is set to be all the buzz at the Hyde Park Art Center. Showcasing her large-scale GRAFT series featuring sculptures that blend elements of Afro-diasporic architecture, accompanied by documentary photographs and drawings that counter colonial narratives, Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT illuminates the past through her work, highlighting the enslaved sub-Saharan African population’s influence on Puerto Rican architecture. 

“GRAFT,” draws on architectural motifs—repeating stars, circles, and other shapes— ubiquitous in Puerto Rico that have since been exported all over the world. In her work, Soto, who was born in Puerto Rico, highlights the cultural appropriation of these patterns, which were originally found on cast-iron fences outside homes in Puerto Rico.

Edra Soto: Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT
(Hyde Park Art Center)
An exploration of the artist’s long-running project inspired by the vernacular architecture of Puerto Rico 
Opens April 22

Issues of the journal regularly include original artwork. Portable Gray commissions artists to produce the journal’s cover and publish work in the pages of the journal. For the fourth issue, Portable Gray commissioned images from Edra Soto’s “Open 24 Hours,” an ongoing series of photographs Soto takes of bottles she collects in and around her neighborhood in South Chicago.

“Prolific” understates the artworks artist Edra Soto has contributed to the cultural scene, radiating from Chicago and stretching to New York, California, Brazil, and beyond. Born in Puerto Rico, Soto treats her roots as a blueprint, building expansive bodies of work upon the boundless inspiration she finds within them. 

The Hyde Park Art Center announced their slate of Spring programs on March 7, including the opening of Edra Soto’s largest survey to date, Destination/el destino: a decade of GRAFT. The survey will be featured at HPAC’s April 22 Spring Center Day.  The GRAFT series was developed as part of HPAC’s Center Program, which, according to the Center, “allows working artists access to space to develop studio practice, inclusion in critical dialogues, guidance from professionals in the field, and a platform to show new works to a broader, diverse audience.” 

Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT is  the largest exhibition to date of the Puerto Rican artist, educator, and community organizer Edra Soto. Rooted in themes of cultural hybridity, the exhibitionfeatures a new large-scale commission of the artist’s GRAFT series with porous sculptures, documentary photographs, drawings, and games that activate the Art Center’s indoor/outdoor main gallery. Creating a playful and open environment for dialogue, transformation, and communal healing, Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT is on view from April 23 to August 6, 2023.

Steeped in the history of iron screen-style architecture common in post-war Puerto Rico, artist Edra Soto's new residency and exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego's North campus will showcase large installation works. Breeze blocks known as quiebrasoles and iron gates known as rejas form the backdrop — almost a viewfinder — for Soto's work. Soto will be in residence through late May, and will be on site for "Meet the Artist" hours this Saturday and Sunday afternoon.

This Thursday, 03-09-23, (6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.) Edra Soto will give a talk as the 2022 Ree Kaneko Award winner. This annual award is bestowed to artists who have participated in Bemis's exhibition or residency programs and is named in honor of Ree Kaneko, Bemis Center co-founder, first Executive Director, and Board Member Emerita.

The Schingoethe Center of Aurora University’s “No Place Like Home” features artwork by 38 artists, including Theaster Gates, Dorothea Lange, Sally Mann, Wendy Red Star, Edra Soto, and Carrie Mae Weems. 

The Schingoethe Center of Aurora University presents "No Place Like Home," an exhibition featuring artwork by 38 artists, including Theaster Gates, Dorothea Lange, Sally Mann, Wendy Red Star, Edra Soto and Carrie Mae Weems. It continues through April 28.

Chicago-based artist Edra Soto is having a moment with two back-to-back exhibitions:
“The Myth of Closure /El Mito del Cierre” continues through March 5 at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art in Glen Ellyn, and her largest exhibition to date, “Edra Soto: Destination/Destino: A Decade of Graft”  at the Hyde Park Art Center, is presented April 23 to August 6.

Every three years, participating Tennessee museums, arts venues, and arts organizations curate and present exhibitions under a common theme designed to connect the exhibitions and promote the state’s existing visual contemporary art scene. This year’s theme for the Triennial is RE-PAIR, authored by Consulting Curator Dr. Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. Participation came from curators from institutions in Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. Each of the four centers will enjoy a highlight weekend of scheduled events and receptions at participating venues. 

Through the Lattice reflects upon the ongoing relevance of the lived environment, whether as owned, alienated, or desired. Each artist foregrounds the role of place—and its aesthetics of style, ornament, design, pattern, and architecture—in their recent works. Though diverse in their methods, the artists share a concern with the deeper meanings of space as well as its material construction. 

The work of 15 of those artists was brought together in what is already the first academic exhibition focused on Puerto Rican art organized by a major U.S. museum in half a century. It is called "There Is No Post-Hurricane World: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria," and it will be on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art, noted for its spectacular collection of modern and contemporary American art.

The Chicago-based Puerto Rican-born artist is having a moment. Her show “The Myth of Closure” is at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art through March 5, and she now has work at New York’s Whitney Museum. Soto’s biggest solo exhibition yet – “Destination/El Destino” – comes to Hyde Park Art Center in the spring. Large-scale, immersive works are often embedded with viewfinders that reveal documentary photos upon closer inspection. Many tackle the legacy of colonialism and question the use of public spaces. 

Edra Soto was in Puerto Rico when Hurricane Maria hit in 2017. She was visiting her mother when, she tells me, “I lost my landscape.” The destruction affected her immensely. She saw things that she felt she could not speak aloud. After being faced with the loss of her home landscape, she began to document the disaster. “I had never seen Puerto Rico the way that it looked then. I had never seen the landscape in that way. I felt, in my bones, that I was part of something historical.” 

Hyde Park Art Center announces “Destination/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT,” the largest exhibition to date of the Puerto Rican artist, educator and community organizer Edra Soto. Rooted in themes of cultural hybridity, the exhibition features a new large-scale commission of the artist’s “GRAFT” series with porous sculptures, documentary photographs, drawings, and games that take advantage of the Art Center’s indoor and outdoor main gallery. 

Politically minded to the core, the Whitney show is also a thing of serious tenderness, and of many individual beauties, among them Candida Alvarez’s double-sided mountain landscapes; Edra Soto’s sculptural garden wall embedded with viewfinder photos of storm-altered island life; and painted salutes — part public mural, part prayer card — to secular martyrs of the near and distant past by Armig Santos, based in San Juan, and Danielle de Jesus, based in Queens.

A solo exhibition of works by multidisciplinary artist Edra Soto, “The Myth of Closure | El Mito del Cierre,” opens soon at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art. Soto “has transformed her practice to honor the loss of what once was, while seeking a path of acceptance for the transition of her aging mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s,” writes the Museum.. “She channels her struggle to reconcile this new reality through deconstruction, collage and familiar themes in her art practice.” 

The Seldoms share the process and outcomes of four Toolbox projects now through November 3 at the Hyde Park Art Center, in celebration of the company’s twentieth anniversary. Hanson, along with company members Damon Green, Dee Alba and Sarah Gonsiorowski developed dances inspired by the creative practices of sculptor Edra Soto, sound artist Sadie Woods, painter Jackie Kazarian and fiber artist Jacqueline Surdell. 

Across town, in downtown L.A., Luis de Jesus Los Angeles has a trifecta of shows that engage architecture in different ways. Nicolas Grenier uses a labyrinth structure as a site for presenting diagrammatic paintings that chart questions of governance (and more metaphysical questions of color), while in a separate space, painter Laura Karetzky compellingly riffs on the nature of the window — as structure, but also as metaphor. In addition, artist Edra Soto dwells on the memories and social signifiers embedded in architecture, reproducing brise soileil structures typical of vernacular Puerto Rican design, but placing within them tiny transparency viewers that feature images of people and places.

Flags have a history as a contentious subject in art, probably because of their lasting grip on our political imaginations. In 1970, for instance, three artists were convicted of flag desecration in New York, and in 1988, Dread Scott sparked controversy by layinga U.S. flag on the ground. I thought of those incidents when seeing “Counter Flags,” curated by Natalia Viera Salgado, a co-founder of the art space Pública in Puerto Rico and a resident at Abrons Arts Center. The exhibition is a mini philosophical inquiry into flags as symbols of nationalism, with attendant pride and critique. Edra Soto and the duo Melissa Raymond and René Sandín contribute eye-catching celebrations of Puerto Rican culture, although a version of Soto’s work, “Tropicalamerican 21” (2021), was recently and more evocatively displayed on Governors Island, where it blew in a sunroom, accompanied by music.

Like transplanting skin, interdisciplinary artist Edra Soto inserts her replicas of vernacular Puerto Rican architectural forms, namely the wrought iron rejas screens and concrete quiebrasoles ubiquitous on the island, into new spaces throughout the Americas in her ongoing GRAFT series. The migration of these forms becomes a metaphor for literal migration, raising issues of colonization, identity, and family in works that stretch wall-to-wall across galleries spaces or become free-standing structures, such as Screenhouse—her public commission for Chicago’s Millennium Park on view through April 2022.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles has revealed works by its artists that have recently added to museum collections. The Nasher Museum in Durham, North Carolina, acquired Peter Williams‘s 2020 painting Birdland; the Baltimore Museum of Art acquired photos from two series, “Relationship” and “Before and After,” by Zackary Drucker; Federico Solmi‘s video installation The Great Farce Portable Theater was acquired by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.; Edra Soto’s installation Open 24 Hours is now held in the collection of the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago; and five works by Erik Olson have been acquired by the Art Gallery of Alberta in Calgary, Canada. Additionally, the gallery announced that Lia Halloran has been named a 2020–21 City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellow. As such, Halloran will be awarded a $10,000 grant to produce a new body of work.

The show also features work by June Edmonds, André Hemer, Kambui Olujimi, and Edra Soto. This Saturday, December 19, all six participating artists will be talking about “making art during a year unlike any other”in a Zoom conversation moderated by Luis De Jesus and Lindsay Preston Zappas, editor-in-chief of CARLA. While we sorely miss in-person events, remote talks like this one make it easier for all artists to participate, so don’t miss this rare occasion.

Unreachable Spring takes its title from the eponymous painting by Laura Krifka. The painting was slated to be featured as the sole work in her first Viewing Room on the gallery website, accompanied by an essay by the writer and art critic Andrew Berardini. Laura began the painting in late March—within days of the start of the Covid lockdown in the U.S., and shortly after learning that she and her husband were expecting their first child. By summer it had become clear to us that it was the lede for a deeper exploration of ideas and subject matter.

The New York–based Joan Mitchell Foundation has named the twenty-five artists who are recipients of this year’s Painters & Sculptors grants, which are meant to assist artists making exceptional work and who are seen as deserving greater national recognition. Each grantee will receive $25,000 in unrestricted funds. The foundation, which was formed in 1993 to celebrate and expand the abstract painter’s vision, noted in a statement that it felt especially compelled to make the awards this year, given the current landscape in which artists are operating.

At Luis De Jesus in Culver City, a group show gathers a loose array of artworks that were made in response to recent events. With so many crises affecting our country, the work diverges in focus, addressing a range of issues: pandemic’s loneliness, the toppling of monuments, and the lives lost to police brutality. Unusually, the gallery has included artist statements next to each artwork, allowing the viewer into the thinking behind each work, and providing a connective personal tone across the exhibition

While group shows can sometimes lack a coherent vision, this one seems worth a trip. All of the works were made during the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from bitingly political paintings to beautiful reflections on home. The featured artists are June Edmonds, André Hemer, Laura Krifka, Kambui Olujimi, Edra Soto, and Peter Williams.

Unreachable Spring is a group exhibition featuring artists prompted by a desire to take refuge in their work and address this transformational moment in a personal way.

Speaking from separate corners of Chicago, Chicago artists Bob Faust, Edra Soto, and Sadie Woods and art historian Greg Foster-Rice brought warmth, passion, and a will to change the world to their panel discussion of art and its potential as agent of social change (part of the Terra Foundation for American Art’s Art Design Chicago program and the Chicago Humanities Festival).The panel began with each artist showcasing their recent work, beginning with Edra Soto’s Graft, recently displayed at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography. Graftborrows from iron screens common in post-war Puerto Rican architecture to allow Soto—and the viewer—to explore the devastation wrought in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria and the later inaction by the United States, the invested colonial power.

Puerto Rican artist Edra Soto's work will be featured in "Unreachable Spring," a group exhibit of works done during the Covid-19 pandemic and which opens at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles gallery on Oct. 17. Soto's piece "Let Love Win" depicts many faces on embossed metal which are highlighted by ink of different colors. One of those faces depicts Breonna Taylor, the Black woman killed by police in her own apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 13 of this year.

Edra Soto spoke with Esthetic Lens recently as part of our Creative Quarantine feature. She brought us into the loop about projects that were put on hold because of quarantine, projects that still moved ahead, the current iteration of her GRAFT piece, and using her Instagram account to advocate for social justice.

Edra Soto’s ongoing 24 Hours project, in which she collects and glorifies discarded liquor bottles, and her GRAFT series, inspired by the iron rejas screens in her native Puerto Rico, have heavily influenced the trajectory of her art career and public interventions. These bottles and iron-wrought kaleidoscopic and geometric formations have graced her home in Garfield Park (where she also co-directs The Franklin, a backyard artist-run project space); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Blue Line Western Station; the Chicago Cultural Center and, most recently, Millennium Park, where her first public art commission Screenhouse, will be on view for two years. 

Chicago-based artist Edra Soto made a gate studded with viewfinders. They show tiny images she captured in Puerto Rico the day after the hurricane. And another artist has an entire installation open for visitors – it’s a recreated beauty salon that explores the struggle of businesses owned by women on the island. The show was organized by Columbia College’s Curatorial Fellow for Diversity in the Arts.

The Museum of Contemporary Photography has reopened with the exhibit “Temporal: Puerto Rican Resistance,” an exploration of Puerto Rico’s contemporary history documenting protests, life during and after Hurricane María and the art of the resistance. Artists include Christopher Gregory-Rivera, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Mari B. Robles López, Eduardo Martínez, Ojos Nebulosos, Adriana Parrilla, Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo, Erika P. Rodríguez, Edra Soto, SUPAKID, and Rogelio Báez Vega

You know what actually, was our very first collaboration? The ‘I Love Chicago Project.’ From when I was in my MFA studio at SAIC. It was an installation to bring together all types of disciplines—sound, performance, musicians. A lion, and a lion tamer. Even then, I was drawn toward leading a project space. I had a fascination with crossing the boundaries.

I expect to see a post-epidemic rising of physical modifications made to existing public spaces and new spaces designed with public distancing considerations in mind. Perhaps these changes manifest more through policy rather than physically, but maybe we will see a combination of both. Most of my work is motivated by a public approach to design a space or an activation. This is something I’m hoping I don’t have to give up in the future, but I wouldn't be surprised by future changes. 

Highlights that both flaunt the space’s architectural potential and honor the integrity of the artwork include Edra Soto’s Open 24 Hours (2017). Her pristine white vitrines house polished liquor bottles found on her daily walks in Chicago’s Garfield Park, challenging notions of “detritus” and making an industrial room devoid of natural light shine.

We came across an installation from Puerto Rican Edra Soto. It's called Open 24 Hours and looks like different stands with several polished glass bottles inside, some clear, some green. And the art has a creative story to go with it: On her walks through Garfield Park, Edra Soto noticed how the streets became a "24/7 living history of a place," always collecting waste on display for all to see. Inspired by the high number of liquor bottles, she began taking them home, removing their labels and photographing them. One man's trash is another woman's art.

I’ve been running THE FRANKLIN with my husband Dan Sullivan since 2012. THE FRANKLIN is a gazebo type of space designed by us and located in the backyard of our home. After completing my MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000, the artist-run community in Chicago became my preferred to-go-to community. I was fascinated by the energy, enthusiasm, comradery and complicitness I kept finding while experiencing the artists-run spaces. This experience brought me lifetime friendships, my first exhibition at a major Chicago art museum and an invaluable collection of art that continues to grow. Exchange, support and the gift of visibility are all a part of the M.O. that motivates us to foster the artist-run model as an intricate part of our life philosophy.

Multidisciplinary artist Edra Soto raises important issues through simple means. Her large-scale sculptures and interventions are modeled on ornate fencing and other architectural details native to Puerto Rico; they’re a subtle introduction to a rich and nuanced cultural history. Recently, she’s begun including “viewfinders” within these fence-like constructions, loaded with photographs from the island and elsewhere. Her projects are simultaneously universal and intensely personal—as is the case with her ongoing fascination with Iris Chacón, a performer and entertainer she first encountered on television as a child.

Edra Soto's warmth, generosity, and kindness are apparent (and contagious). She speaks candidly about her work, her influences, and her upbringing in Cupey, Puerto Rico. Her motivations, her life experiences, and her perspectives push her audience to more closely examine their own neighborhoods, sidewalks, fences and homes. In a contemporary art world that can often reject the participation of the audience, Soto takes the hands of her viewers and looks them in the eye. She acknowldges their bodies, their physical presence, and their memories. Her artistic and personal lives are bound together, which some might consider a great risk. However, her exceptional body of work deomnstrates the opportunity for shared growth by revealing vulnerabilities. 

Graft (2018), the most recent version of Soto’s ongoing series of architectural interventions, transforms the Cultural Center’s lower-level gallery into a site for active viewing and engagement, in keeping with this civic institution’s public mission and the artist’s commitment to social practice. The central component is a continuous wood screen that runs the length of the gallery’s street-side windows, obscuring our view of the outside world. Instead, the viewer’s gaze is directed to the screen inside, painted a vibrant monochrome coral and punctuated with a rhythmic pattern of geometric cut-outs.

Hall and Soto’s “Forgotten Forms” is a clever composition of seemingly everyday objects that play off of each other’s vibrant colors and visual architecture in order to paint a vivid image of neighborhood identity.

Soto pays tribute to her native Puerto Rico by centering the exhibit around the coral-pink patterned concrete blocks or “quiebrasoles,” used as bus shelters in urban areas to shield waiting passengers from the sun. Additionally, the exhibit contains a massive series of pink “rejas,” or iron fences, another colorful feature of urban Puerto Rico.

Edra Soto’s Open 24 Hours is an exploration of consumption, waste, and vernacular architecture. Discarded liquor bottles accumulated during Soto’s daily walks through East Garfield Park in Chicago are transformed into jewel-like totems. Rejas, decorative iron screens enclosing outdoor domestic areas in Puerto-Rico, also serves as an influence on the work—highlighting an interplay between security and ornamentation. They are beautiful, haunting, socially conscious works.

Edra is a conceptual artist working out of her home in Garfield Park surrounded by two dogs, several masks, and an array of work that her and her husband have collected over the years. It was this collection that was a major piece of inspiration for THE FRANKLIN, an exhibition space and free-standing structure existing just behind their home.