Edra Soto

Edra Soto is a Puerto Rican-born artist, educator, and co-director of outdoor project space The Franklin. Soto instigates meaningful, relevant, and often difficult conversations surrounding socioeconomic and cultural oppression, erasure of history, and loss of cultural knowledge. Having grown up in Puerto Rico and now immersed in her Chicago community, the artist has evolved to raise questions through her work about constructed social orders, diasporic identity, and the legacy of colonialism.

Soto’s recent solo exhibitions include The Sculpture Center, Cleveland; Maine College of Art & Design; Hyde Park Art Center; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego, among others. Her work has been featured in notable group exhibitions, including the Carnegie Museum of Art; Driehaus Museum, IL; MSU Broad Art Museum, among others.

Soto has been awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant; Joyce Award; 3Arts Next Level Award; Illinois Arts Council Fellowship; Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award; the US LatinX Art Forum Fellowship and the MacArthur Foundation International Connections Fund. Soto has received numerous public commissions, including Public Art Fund at Central Park, New York; Noor Riyadh; the Boston Public Art Triennial; the Chicago Architecture Biennial; Terminal 5 at O’Hare International Airport; Chicago Botanic Garden, and Millennium Park in Chicago. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

Programs:

• From Their Hands to Ours – MACLA x Montalvo Collaborative Exhibition