My interdisciplinary practice is embedded in visual arts, social practice, and architectural interventions. At this intersection, I strike a balance between an immersive collective experience while also sharing an intimate perspective with my viewers. To achieve this, I create generous and inclusive experiences that engage objects as both a symbol and an archive for understanding history, culture, and formations of knowledge. In dismantling the boundaries between the audience, the work, and my role as artist, I prompt viewers to reconsider the nature of urban space, cross-cultural dynamics, and personal responsibility. I instigate meaningful, relevant, and often difficult conversations surrounding socioeconomic and cultural oppression, erasure of history, and loss of cultural knowledge. Growing up in Puerto Rico, and now immersed in my Chicago community, my work has evolved to raise questions about constructed social orders, diasporic identity, and the legacy of colonialism.

The body of work that showcases my practice is “Graft”. For the past decade, I dedicated the greater part of my artistic career to developing this ongoing project. “Graft” investigates Puerto Rican cultural memory which often masks the Black heritage of the island as folklore. However, as defended by Architect Edwin Quiles, the existence of blackness is undeniable as the architecture, civil engineering, and urban design in many of Puerto Rico’s residential sectors mimic those of West Africa’s Yoruba communities. I translate these staples of presumed Puerto Rican design as a means to expose the true origins of these architectural elements. This upends our comprehension of cultural knowledge both within Puerto Rico and subsequently the colonial lineage in the United States, knowledge still excluded from education in the Caribbean and beyond.

Edra Soto (she/her) is a Puerto-Rican born artist, curator, educator, and co-director of the outdoor project space, The Franklin. Soto instigate meaningful, relevant, and often difficult conversations surrounding socioeconomic and cultural oppression, erasure of history, and loss of cultural knowledge. Growing up in Puerto Rico, and now immersed in her Chicago community, Soto’s work has evolved to raise questions about constructed social orders, diasporic identity, and the legacy of colonialism. Soto has exhibited extensively at venues including El Museo del Barrio NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, IL, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico, PR, Hyde Park Art Center, IL, The Arts Club of Chicago, IL, Millennium Park, IL, ICA San Diego, CA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. 

Soto has attended residency programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME, Beta-Local, PR, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, FL, Headlands Center for the Arts, NY, Project Row Houses, TX and Art Omi, NY, among others. She has been awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, the Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship, the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant and the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award among others. 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.