The nonprofit Sculpture Center in Cleveland received a disturbing letter in early May from National Endowment for the Arts saying the agency was withdrawing support from a project by Chicago-based artist Edra Soto that included a show just about to open at the center. The letter seemed to imply that the NEA would not pay the final $6,000 of a $40,000 grant after having sent $34,000 in January.
The news linked The Sculpture Center to efforts by the administration of President Donald Trump to cancel hundreds of NEA grants. It also may have distracted from the exhibit, titled “La Casa de Todos / Everyone’s Home.”
As it turns out, despite the letter, the NEA did provide the $6,000 in late May, Grace Chin, the center’s director, said in an interview on June 30.
Nevertheless, the money machinations diverted attention from Soto’s show, which opened May 16. That’s a shame because the exhibition is excellent and very much worth seeing before it ends July 19 at the center, located at 12210 Euclid Ave. at the edge of University Circle and Little Italy.
A native of Puerto Rico, Soto, born in 1971, creates sculptures and installations with architectural qualities that explore the ideas of home and dwelling, often with references to everyday townscapes on the island.
Soto earned a master’s degree in fine arts in 2000 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since then, in addition to her own work, she and her husband, artist Dan Sullivan, have run a gazebo-style gallery called The Franklin in the backyard of their home in Chicago’s East Garfield Park. Other projects by the couple include installations at the Chicago Botanic Gardens, Millennium Park and sets for the hit Hulu streaming series, “The Bear.”
Exploring indoor porches
At the Sculpture Center, Soto has created a compelling arrangement of colorful, large-scale enclosures that meander through the gallery, inviting exploration. Soto exhibited a version of the same concept in New York’s Central Park in 2024.
A wall label says the structures are intended to mimic the “marquesinas, or porches, of working-class Puerto Rican residences, a space that bridges the intimacy of the home and community.’’ The word can also mean canopy, or bus shelter.
Soto used aluminum tubes and joints normally employed for scaffolding to frame a series of interlocking cubes measuring eight by eight feet. She then partially enclosed the frameworks with laser-cut panels of lightweight PVC Sintra Board, a material normally used for outdoor signs.
Soto had the panels cut in fanlike linear patterns that resemble the ribs of a lawn rake and painted them in tropical hues including hot pink, turquoise and cerulean. The finished panels look like metal, and recall decorative iron grillwork, or rejas, commonly used on houses in Puerto Rico.
Arranged in opposing directions, the radiating fan motifs interact with one another to create eye-tingling Op Art-style patterns as you peer through overlapping layers of the enclosures.
Chin said that Soto didn’t intend to reference Op Art, but the jangling optical effects are certainly present, and they add vitality and a sense of motion. Slivers and shards of light shimmer as you pass through the enclosures, accentuating your movement and dramatizing the daylight that pours in through the big storefront windows at the Sculpture Center.
Soto’s structures also create a pleasing architectural dialogue with the linear patterns of the gallery’s floorboards, exposed ceiling joists.
The marquesina enclosures aren’t exactly like porches, although they convey the public nature of the gallery spaces outside them, and the more private quality of the areas inside. These aspects of the installation are easy to “get.’’
But Soto’s piece is not quite so simple. The interiors of her enclosures are furnished, if that’s the right word, with ornate, cruciform panels of Sintra Board grillwork that center on small peepholes of the kind typically used in a door. By squinting through the tiny holes, a viewer can see small vintage photos gathered from Clevelanders depicting weddings, birthday parties and other activities of people whose names we never learn.
Some of the peepholes are embedded in small circular mirrors, which means that as you move in for a look, you’re also peering at a closeup reflection of yourself acting as a voyeur.
Soto doesn’t seem to want to induce guilt or shame, however. She does want to create awareness that the viewer is being invited into a relationship of tenderness and trust with the strangers whose lives are on display.
Soto’s exhibition is one of the main outcomes of an eight-month residency at the Sculpture Center funded by the NEA and a $100,000 grant from the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation. Soto spent part of her time holding creative workshops to gather ideas and impressions from residents in Cleveland’s predominantly Hispanic Clark-Fulton neighborhood.
Those conversations led to a tabloid newsprint publication with poems and artworks by Cleveland artists and writers that explore aspects of immigration, and a small companion exhibit of works by local artists on the same topic.
A future phase of the project will involve the construction of a permanent bus shelter designed by Soto for a spot on West 25th Street in Clark-Fulton. A community celebration after the shelter is scheduled for Sept. 18.
The Sculpture Center show marks Soto as an artist with a strong architectural sensibility and an ability to weave compelling cultural narratives around physical structures. Despite the momentary upset over NEA funding in May, her project in Cleveland appears headed for a strong finish.
