CLEVELAND, Ohio – The Sculpture Center is one of the few institutions in the country dedicated solely to sculpture and the advancement of sculpture-specific artists.
That’s a big part of what makes its current, multifaceted exhibition with Puerto Rican-born, Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, educator and curator Edra Soto so grand.
Soto chose to collaborate with The Center to stage a citywide exhibition that explores the stories of migration, displacement and cultural memory within Cleveland’s Latinx community.
“La Distancia / The Distance,” a permanently placed Soto sculpture off W. 25th St. in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood – home to Cleveland’s highest concentration of Puerto Rican and Latinx residents – takes the form of a sculptural RTA outdoor bus shelter.
It opens later this summer in front of the MetroHealth Main Campus Medical Center, 2500 MetroHealth Drive, Cleveland.
Two companion exhibitions are currently on display at The Center’s galleries: “La Casa de Todos / Everyone’s Home” and “La Casa Compartida / The Home We Share.” Soto’s work often blurs what constitutes public and private space and these engaging showcases are no exception.
The former uses architectural motifs such as rejas (decorative ironwork) and quiebrasoles (concrete breeze blocks) from Puerto Rican architecture to evoke cultural memory and heritage – particularly of African and Yoruba influences found in Caribbean design.
The latter is a meditation on migration, displacement and cultural memory – curated by Soto with the help of Grace Chin and Héctor Castellanos Lara. It showcases a group of 11 artists and creatives from Cleveland who have experienced migration’s joy and pain.
The work of Edra Soto has landed in Cleveland. Soto chose to collaborate with The Sculpture Center to stage a city-wide exhibition that explores the Cleveland Latinx community’s stories of migration, displacement and cultural memory through two companion exhibitions in The Center’s galleries; a permanent outdoor public artwork in Clark-Fulton where the city’s largest Puerto Rican community resides, and a journal of art and stories. Eleven local artists have been engaged to enrich and extend the community’s stories.The Sculpture Center
The artist pool for “Compartida” includes Ewuresi Archer, Nathalie Bermudez, Orlando Caraballo, Laura Camila Medina, James Negron, Maya Peroune, Dante Rodriguez, Oliver C. St. Clair, Ariel Vergez, Otelia Vergez and Gina Washington.
Audio provided by collaborator DJ Sadie Woods layers their stories with an ambiance and collective memory energy fundamental to the experience of finding “home.” A printed-digital journal accompanies the exhibition.
The Sculpture Center exhibitions run through Saturday, July 19.
“I think about mainstream culture with my work and do so very much in relationship to Puerto Rico, because the majority of the people that live there are working class, and that’s my upbringing,” Soto told cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer in an April interview.
“I always want to make sure that my work had rigor — that it is serious — but not so much so that it acts inaccessible or elite for a particular group,” she added. “Sometimes, more scholarly art is not very inviting for a general audience, and I don’t come from that.”
Soto’s work is internationally renowned for blending personal narrative with broader themes like diaspora, colonial history and cultural hybridity. Her work is both quite particular yet widely accessible and often involves public interaction.
Soto is perhaps best known for her GRAFT Series.
That site-specific public art project began in 2013, with Soto “grafting” Puerto Rican design elements onto buildings and public spaces across the country as a “poetic representation of migration, adaptation, and cultural transplantation.”
In these works, Soto integrates seating, interactive components and communal experiences in her installations – democratizing art spaces and making them more inclusive. GRAFT is currently on view at Freedman Plaza in Central Park in New York.
Soto told cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer that cultural memories of her upbringing in Puerto Rico were “very much connected” to her childhood through a Catholic elementary and high school filter. But it took years for her to understand the colonial impact of that, because “as a child you don’t have any sense of that dogma,” or the meaning behind what you’re saying and repeating.
“Catholicism was so embedded with elementary and high school,” Soto said. “All these schools have a church next to them and you’d go to both just about every day.”
That got Soto to thinking about her upbringing and how the energy of lines and materials evoked specific feelings that transcended language. This resonated even more for the artist when her mother lost her ability to speak due to Alzheimer’s and dementia.
“For me, to be able to communicate with her was a big challenge,” Soto said.
“I kept thinking about the signals and abstraction in my work – and that abstraction really became a language itself. It’s my language. Like a cross is very symbolic, but it also is a subtle way of conveying direction and distances in journeys and migration.”
To that end, much of the work at the Sculpture Center in “Todos” mimics the distinct marquesinas (porches) of working-class Puerto Rican residences, a space that bridges the intimacy of home and community.
That’s a big reason why Soto’s work has exhibited at major institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and El Museo del Barrio in New York City. Her art creates a common language around experiences that few have deeply connected to before.
“Mainstream culture in Puerto Rico is important. People consume information from television,” Soto said. “[Puerto Rican rap artist] Bad Bunny did a takeover at a local television, sat in on the local news. And then he went to the local midday show and changed the stage to include plants and plastic chairs and took the opportunity to convey his inspirations and what he wanted to talk about.”
As a co-anchor on the morning show “NotiCentro al Amanecer” on WAPA-TV, Bunny (born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) was part of a two-hour broadcast. He reported the news, covered the weather, did a shot of pitorro de coco (local rum), discussed his new album, his role in a short film, and reflected on the importance of Puerto Rican history.
The broadcast got the Puerto Rican community at large talking. Soto aims for that same kind of impact.
“I hope to bring that kind of energy in what I do,” Soto said. “Colonialism and tourism have largely shaped the dialogue and sense of place. But there’s so much more to know.”
Edra Soto’s work “La Casa de Todos / Everyone’s Home” and “La Casa Compartida / The Home We Share” is on view at the Sculpture Center, 12210 Euclid Ave., Cleveland through Saturday, July 19. “La Distancia” opens later this summer. sculpturecenter.org