Chicago Artist Highlight: Edra Soto

We’re excited to begin to announce our artist features for our Chicago location, coming late this Spring. In our new lobby, we’re working with Puerto-Rican born and Chicago-based artist @edrasoto to display our city color palette in a fresh way. Edra is creating a site-specific iteration of her GRAFT series: guests will peer through viewfinders in the installation to discover the photos that inspired each color in the palette.

The artist has attended residency programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Beta-Local, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, Headlands Center for the Arts, Project Row Houses and Art Omi, among others. Soto has been awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, the Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship, the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, among others. Between 2019-2020, 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.

We can’t wait to see Soto’s work come to life at Color Factory Chicago!

All photos from Edra Soto’s website.