Edra Soto

Edra Soto is a Puerto Rican-born artist, educator, and co-director of The Franklin, an outdoor project space located in Chicago. 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, Soto has evolved to raise questions through her work about constructed social orders, diasporic identity, and the legacy of colonialism.

She has recently exhibited at The Sculpture Center (Cleveland); Maine College of Art & Design; Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago); and the Institute of Contemporary Art (San Diego), among others. Her work has been featured in notable group exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh); Driehaus Museum (Chicago); and Michigan State University Broad Art Museum.

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 U.S. Latinx Art Forum Fellowship, and the MacArthur Foundation International Connections Fund. Soto has received numerous public commissions, including from 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 (Chicago). Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City); Pérez Art Museum (Miami); Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago.  

Programs:

• Marcus Exhibition The Art and Architecture of Maybe (2026)

• From Their Hands to Ours – MACLA x Montalvo Collaborative Exhibition (2025)