Acting as both an architectural meditation on home and a sanctuary of ideological formation is Edra Soto’s solo exhibition, the place of dwelling. Installed within Gunnar Birkerts’s atrium for the tenth anniversary of the Atrium Project at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Soto’s intervention converses with the space, activating its cathedral-like volume as a threshold between the sacred and the domestic, the institutional and the everyday.
Drawing from the visual language of Puerto Rican wrought-iron screens, ceramics, fans, and devotional ornament, Soto translates the aesthetics of working-class interiors into a spatial grammar of memory, labor, and belief, proposing the home as a parallel to the church and the museum alike: a place where meaning is rehearsed, rituals are learned, and histories are quietly inscribed.
The atrium becomes a porous body, animated by objects that oscillate between utility and symbol, by a choreography of materials that evokes both protection and exposure. Soto’s work resists monumental spectacle in favor of an enveloping intimacy; viewers are not positioned as distant observers but as participants moving through a lived environment shaped by migration, Catholic iconography, and the ethos of care. In doing so, the installation subtly interrogates the colonial and disciplinary histories embedded in both religious and museum spaces, while honoring them as sites where community and resilience are forged.
As a culmination of a decade-long commissioning initiative dedicated to Latine artists by the museum, the place of dwelling resonates beyond its formal achievement. It asserts the museum as a space capable of holding vernacular knowledge and diasporic memory with reverence. It affirms Soto’s practice as one that transforms everyday objects into vessels of collective and spiritual continuity. Thus, the exhibition is not only visual but ethical. We are invited to a reimagining of belonging, where architecture becomes an archive of lived experience, and the act of dwelling itself is understood as a sacred, political gesture. —Charles Moore
