Photo credit : Steph Murray
Edra Soto is a Puerto-Rican born artist, curator, 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 has exhibited extensively at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago (IL), El Museo del Barrio (NY), ICA San Diego (CA), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY). She has been awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, the Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship, the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, and the US LatinX Art Forum Fellowship among others.
As part of the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund, Soto exhibited and traveled to Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Her recent and upcoming projects include a public art commission for the Chicago Architecture Biennial; a collaboration with poet Adalber Salas Hernandez for Lit & Luz Festival at Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City; exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pennsylvania and ICA Maine College of Art in Maine and a Public Art Commission for Public Art Fund at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, New York. 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.