Waubonsee Community College’s Art Department is now exhibiting work by Chicago-based artist, educator, curator and gallery director Edra Soto. The exhibition, “It’s Been a Very Good Year,” can be found in the college’s Dickson Window Art Project Space in Dickson Center at the Sugar Grove campus, Route 47 and Waubonsee Drive. In addition, the artist will offer a lecture in September that is open to the public.
Viewing hours for the exhibit are Monday through Friday from 5:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., Saturday from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. The work will be displayed until October 23, 2016.
Soto’s lecture at Waubonsee takes place from 11 a.m. to noon in Von Ohlen Hall, Room 201, of the Sugar Grove campus. The event is free and open to the public.
“It’s Been a Very Good Year” uses decorative iron vine fencing as a symbol for cultivating civility. In the installation, Soto uses vines as a metaphor to the concepts associated with vines, including interconnection, opportunity, fertility, continuation, eternity and diversity. Soto’s education includes an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Beta-Local in Puerto Rico and the Robert Rauschenberg Residency Program in Captiva, Florida through a 3A Arts Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.
She is currently a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is co-director of THE FRANKLIN, an outdoor project space that Soto and her husband designed, fabricated and direct together.
