Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to invite you to an exhibition walk-through and conversation between artist Edra Soto and curator Joey Lico in conjunction with EDRA SOTO: The Myth of Closure / El Mito del Cierre, on Wednesday, December 15 at 7:00 p.m. This is an in-person event. Reservations are not required, but encouraged.
The Myth of Closure is a deeply personal body of work exploring loss, closure, and the complicated associations of home. This new work builds on an ongoing project entitled GRAFT – Soto’s exploration of home which serves as a container for her own relationship to home in Puerto Rico and the United States, where she currently resides.
Complementary to the installation "Casas Islas | Houses Islands" by Edra Soto, Los Angeles street musician Roberto Hernandez interprets on trumpet the melody from the song "Historia de un Amor" written by composer Carlos Eleta Almarán in 1955.
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Edra Soto is a Puerto Rican-born artist, curator, educator, and co-director of the outdoor project space, The Franklin. Soto has exhibited extensively at venues including El Museo del Barrio, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art's satellite, The Momentary, AK; Albright-Knox Northland, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, IL; Smart Museum, IL and the Abrons Arts Center, NY. Recently, Soto completed a large-scale public art commission titled “Screenhouse”, currently on view at Millennium Park in Chicago. The artist has attended residency programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Beta-Local, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, Headlands Center for the Arts, Project Row Houses and Art Omi, among others. Soto has been awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, the Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship, the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, among others. Between 2019-2020, Soto exhibited and traveled to Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as part of the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund. Soto holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree from Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico. The artist lives and works in Chicago.
Joey Lico is a partner in The Cultivist and serves as their Global Curator. Before joining The Cultivist, Joey was in director positions at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and Independent Curators International (ICI), where she nurtured a variety of projects across all disciplines of art. From 2008-2016, and under the Obama Administration, she worked with The White House as an adviser on their ACT/ART Committee bringing contemporary art into public policy. Joey is the Co-Chair of the Executive Committee for the Whitney Museum’s Contemporaries and her focus and expertise is decolonizing research methodologies in relation to art.
For further information, please call 213-395-0762, or email: gallery@luisdejesus.com.