Graft, 2023
Edra Soto
Corten Steel and Polished Concrete
Hailing from Puerto Rico, Edra Soto has delved deep into her cultural memory to create Graft, a collection of four sculptures that serve as benches and celebrate architectural fusion. The installation beautifully incorporates Puerto Rican palm leaves into a geometric pattern, casting playful shadows and evoking a comforting sense of the island in the heart of Boston.
The motifs found in Graft draw inspiration from Puerto Rican “rejas” (wrought-iron grates) and their West African Yoruba origins, encouraging visitors to explore the complex circulations of architecture and cultural heritage. As she does in many of her works, this internationally recognized artist, curator, and educator invites the public to reconsider the origins of what are often assumed to be Puerto Rican motifs and the impact of colonialism.
Photos above (c) Annielly Camargo
visit
Graft is on view at Central Wharf Park across from the New England Aquarium at 250 Atlantic Ave, Boston, MA.
The closest MBTA Stop is the Aquarium stop on the Blue Line.
About the Artist
Photo of Edra Soto (c) Steph Murray
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.
“Modernity has the habit of taking credit for many ideas that predate it. In Graft, I challenge this narrative and invite the public to reconsider the origins of what we often assume are Puerto Rican motifs.”
INSTALLATION PHOTOS
local Curation and perspective
Graft is Now + There’s fourth collaboration with guest curator Pedro Alonzo, who has previously brought us Oscar Tuazon’s Growth Rings in 2019, Jose Davila’s To Each Era Its Art. To Art, Its Freedom in 2020, and most recently, Claudia Comte’s Five Marble Leaves in 2022.
Pedro Alonzo is a Boston-based independent curator. He is currently an Adjunct Curator at Dallas Contemporary. Since 2006 he has specialized in producing exhibitions that transcend the boundaries of museum walls and spill out into the urban landscape, addressing audiences beyond the traditional museum public. In 2017 he formalized his practice by establishing A&C. At the ICA Boston, he curated Shepard Fairey’s 20-year survey, Supply, and Demand. For the MCA San Diego, he organized the group exhibition Viva la Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape, which featured site-specific works inside the museum and throughout downtown San Diego. In 2015 Alonzo began to develop exhibitions designed to engage the public, starting with a citywide exhibition in Philadelphia, Open Source: Engaging Audiences in Public Space, followed by working with JR to place a gigantic image of a Mexican child named Kikito, overlooking the US/México border wall in Tecate. Since 2016 Alonzo has worked with The Trustees, Massachusetts’s largest conservation and preservation non-profit, to launch and curate the organization’s first Art and the Landscape initiative, resulting in site-specific commissions created by the artists: Sam Durant (2016), Jeppe Hein (2016), Alicja Kwade (2018), and Doug Aitken (2019).
The latest projects he developed at Dallas Contemporary are a major exhibition that brought together rarely-seen works by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara in 2021, and a Shepard Fairey, Backward Forward in 2022. He is currently working on Amnesia Atómica, an ongoing project by Pedro Reyes, commissioned by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, centered on reviving and reintroducing the issue of nuclear threat into the public narrative.
“Soto brings us elements of an exuberant tropical aesthetic to Central Wharf Park, with the palm leaf patterns based on rejas found in Puerto Rico that play beautifully with the surrounding oak trees.”
public art = team work
Special thanks to BRM Production Management for helping N+T, Soto, and Alonzo bring this project to life!
About Central Wharf Park
Designed by Reed Hilderbrand, a Cambridge-based landscape architecture practice, Central Wharf Park is an urban micro-forest composed of 24 mature oak trees and sits between the New England Aquarium and the Rose Kennedy Greenway at 250 Atlantic Avenue in Downtown Boston. The park has ramped entry points as well as step up curb entries and is paved in cobblestones. The artwork is sited throughout the park.