“If you are curious enough, and you get close, you will see that there’s more to the work than just the fence.”
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.
The Puerto Rican born artist, represented by Luis de Jesus in Los Angeles, co-directs the outdoor project space The Franklin in Chicago where she lives and works since attending the School of the Art Institute for her MFA. From 2019 to 2020, the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund supported iterations of Soto’s work at Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; the Smart Museum, Chicago; and Salvador, Brazil.
I spoke with Soto on the occasion of her solo show at Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, and the concurrent exhibition of her work in El Museo del Barrio’s Estamos Bien—La Trienal 20/21. We talked about her efforts to make visible the role that African diasporic traditions have played and continue to play in Puerto Rican architecture, what it was like to make art after the trauma of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, and her new “Casa-Islas | House-Islands” series of conceptual drawings that reflects on isolation and home in a time of pandemic.
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Read the full interview at brooklynrail.com