Edra Soto with The Sculpture Center are one of the five winners of the 2024 Joyce Awards, which lift up collaborations between artists of color and arts and community organizations throughout the Great Lakes region.
“Along with so many others, mine is a story of moving between various liminal spaces in search of home. Through this project, I want to enshrine those moments of waiting, of existing in the in-between, both through the collection of stories and mementos and the performance and celebration of community art, but also in a literal sense—by changing the physical architecture of the landscape and unapologetically taking up space. In the last 25 years, Cleveland’s Latinx community has nearly doubled; La Distancia, through its many phases and its ultimate creation of a project archive, will allow this community to see themselves—and be seen—in a meaningful and intentional way.” -Edra Soto
Puerto-Rican-born, Chicago-based artist Edra Soto will collaborate with Latinx artists and community members in Cleveland, Ohio to create La Distancia, an outdoor sculptural installation and immersive gallery exhibition at The Sculpture Center (TSC). Addressing themes of displacement, diasporic identity, cultural memory, and incorporating architectural themes from her native Puerto Rico, Soto will create a sculptural outdoor bus shelter that will serve as a repository of art, stories, mementos, and ephemera from the surrounding community—particularly Cleveland’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood, home to the city’s highest concentration of Puerto Rican and Latinx residents—as well as a stage for performances and dialogue. Local artists and community members’ contributions will be displayed in both the outdoor installation and TSC’s indoor gallery space, juxtaposing and finding common threads between seemingly disparate lives. Taking shape over the course of an eight-month residency that will include workshops, interviews, and community meals and gatherings, La Distancia will weave together personal and collective stories of immigration to amplify community voices and celebrate the deep and growing roots of Cleveland’s Latinx community.
About Edra Soto
Edra Soto is a Puerto-Rican born artist, curator, educator, and co-director of the outdoor project space, The Franklin. 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 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 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, the inaugural Foundwork Prize, the Ree Kaneko Award, and the US LatinX Art Forum Fellowship, among others. Soto traveled and exhibited in Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as part of the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund. Soto has attended residency programs at Skowhegan, ME; the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, FL; Headlands, CA; Project Row Houses, TX; and Art Omi, NY, among others. Recent presentations include the Chicago Architecture Biennial, O’Hare’s International Airport T5 Expansion Project, Untitled, and Art Basel Miami Beach. 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.
About The Sculpture Center
Founded in 1989, The Sculpture Center (TSC) provides critical resources to sculptors along their journey. TSC is one of a few institutions in the country dedicated solely to sculpture and advances the careers of sculpture specific artists through creation, exhibition, mentoring, and conversation. TSC believes that no matter their career stage, artists of all voices and backgrounds need opportunities to create without commercial constraints so they may contribute to the communities we want to live in. Through a year-round series of exhibitions, talks, and events, TSC seeks to become a regionally and nationally recognized cultural space for sculptors where creative ideas, experiences, and the community connect and flourish.
In 2021 TSC launched Spotlight, an annual showcase series that engages a nationally recognized midcareer sculptor to collaborate with diverse Cleveland communities in a two-part exhibition both in the gallery and at an outdoor site. The narratives that occur between art and site contribute to national conversations on today’s social issues affecting our lives and communities. Spotlight is accompanied by a rigorous set of community-based programs. For more information, visit sculpturecenter.org.
Fellow 2024 awardees include: Andrea Assaf with Arab American National Museum (Dearborn); Marcus Elliot with Detroit Parks Coalition (Detroit); Terry Guest with Chicago Children’s Theatre (Chicago); and Katie Ka Vang with Theater Mu (Minneapolis-Saint Paul).