Edra Soto
Edra Soto is a Puerto-Rican born artist, curator, educator, and co-director of the 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. 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), 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. 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.
Featured Artworks
Edra Soto has crowd-funded a project with 3AP
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- $2,437 raised of $2,150 goal
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Inspired by Chicago's alternative gallery scene, this project aims to give The Franklin a permanent home by relocating and installing this outdoor exhibition space in the backyard of our house located in the Garfield Park neighborhood.
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- $6,242 raised of $5,000 goal
- 0 Days 0:00:00 LEFT
Five years ago, I co-created The Franklin artist-run project space with my husband in the backyard of our home in Garfield Park. Since then, more than 100 artists have presented site-specific works for the visiting public. Perhaps lesser known to …
Read more about The Franklin Collection