Presented as part of La Residencia

Curated by Natalia Viera Salgado

For her La Residencia residency at Abrons, Chicago-based, Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist Edra Soto will present Plaza Pública, a modular domino table, custom designed for playing and multi use in a physically distanced reality. The table will be installed in the Abrons Arts Center Amphitheater.

La Residencia is a co-located residency program in partnership with Pública. A cultural space in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Pública aims to provide a platform for local and international artists to strengthen relationships between Puerto Rico and a global audience. Over the course of eighteen months, Pública Co-Director Natalia Viera Salgado will serve as Abrons’ 2020-21 Curatorial Resident and will support the development of projects at Abrons and Pública.

This program will be presented in the Abrons Amphitheater. By attending this installation, you are required to respect our Community Agreements:

Born in Puerto Rico, Edra Soto is an interdisciplinary artist, and co-director of the outdoor project space THE FRANKLIN. Recent venues presenting Soto’s work include Crystal Bridges’s The Momentary, Bentonville, AR, Albright-Knox Northland, Buffalo, NY; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; Smart Museum, Chicago, IL; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL. This fall Soto completed the public art commission titled Screenhouse for a two-year exhibition at Millennium Park, Chicago, IL. Soto 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; Art Omi; and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center Arts/Industry. Soto was awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship; an Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship; and a 3Arts Foundation residency fellowship to Montalvo Arts Center. Most recently, she was the award winner of the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize. Soto’s work has been included in three exhibitions supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund: A Chicago / Puerto Rico exhibition at Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico; a Chicago / Cuba exhibition at the Smart Museum (Illinois) and a Chicago / Brazil exchange to take place in Salvador, Brazil in 2020. 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. She is a Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Natalia Viera Salgado is a Puerto Rican independent curator and curatorial consultant based in New York City. She is also the co-founder of :Pública Espacio Cultural, an independent art space in Alto del Cabro, Santurce Puerto Rico. Her art historical research focuses on contemporary art in relation to decolonial practices, architecture, social and environmental justice, and new media with a keen interest in hybrid and interdisciplinary projects. She has worked at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, collaborated with design studio División de Diseño (Puerto Rico), worked at El Museo de Barrio (New York, NY), Art in General (Brooklyn, New York), Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, New York) and The Nathan Cummings Foundation (New York). Viera is a founding member of Colectivo se habla español, a collective working on artistic and social projects that expand the limits of language while addressing migration, identity, human rights, and memory. Viera holds a MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts (NYC).

Exhibition Date: June 6, 2021 - August 8, 2021 

Wear a mask over your mouth AND nose at all times.

Maintain 6 feet of physical distance from others at all times. 

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