GRAFT

About

Born in Puerto Rico and residing for decades in Chicago, artist Edra Soto has found many ways over the years to transplant forms of Boricua domesticity to a mainland context. With her GRAFT project, which has been realized in many Chicago locations, she focuses on elaborate screen-like porch enclosures known as rejas, ubiquitous throughout the island. For the installation at Cuchifritos, there will also be a takeaway newspaper in which various writers reflect on the complex colonial influences that brought rejas into being. The newspaper and thereja installed in the gallery window can be contemplated from seats modeled on San Juan’s bus shelters, another feature of the island’s unique architectural vernacular.

The Caribbean marks the starting point of modern Western incursions into this hemisphere, and is the place where indigenous and African populations toiled under and resisted white force, without significant white support. Yet Puerto Ricans, as incomplete American citizens, can seem to occupy a background place in conversations around immigration, history, and race. At a time when Puerto Rico’s crippling debt has forced difficult conversations about its ambiguous relationship with the U.S., in an election year that sees anti-Latino rhetoric running high, the way in which colonial history can disappear into the woodwork is made literal in Soto’s ornate yet understated installation.