Last month, the artist Edra Soto debuted Graft, a new installation presented by the Public Art Fund at Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman Plaza. It’s a grand structure that still manages to feel welcoming, with bespoke angular tables built for domino playing. Soto may be familiar to visitors of the Whitney’s excellent “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria” exhibition from 2022, and we caught up with her to hear about this ambitious new public project.

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The rejas used in your sculptural practice are ubiquitous in Puerto Rico, but may not be familiar to all New Yorkers. Can you explain their significance?

The designs of rejas—wrought iron fences—that I represent in my work are architectural motifs that can be found in working-class homes of Puerto Ricans. My project focuses on representing the rejas and decorative concrete block motifs present in Puerto Rico; not only because I grew up there but also because learning about their cultural significance, I became aware that this information is not a part of Puerto Rico’s populous knowledge. For example, author Edwin R. Quiles Rodriguez relates that the shotgun layout of the working-class residence was adapted from the Yoruba dwellings of African slaves, which were developed in Haiti, and then migrated abroad with hacienda owners after the slaves rebelled. Architect Jorge Ortiz Colom’s monograph, “The African Influence in the Design Build Edification of Puerto Rico,” states that criollo architecture, which incorporates quiebrasoles and rejas, originated from Sub-Saharan Africa through the population brought to Puerto Rico as slaves to work plantations during the rise of colonization. He argues that this influence is largely overlooked by historians due to the impression that ‘Africans could not transplant their ancestral ways of life under the inhumane conditions of their transfer and the lack of freedom in their new home.’

It was previously thought that this decorative architecture was an amalgamation of European features that had undergone transformation through the Western lens. Graft highlights the inextricably intertwined histories of European colonialism, the U.S. and Puerto Rico, and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora through the framework of architectural intervention. I began the Graft series to address the complex sentiments generated from migrating to the U.S. while remaining connected to family on the island—a feeling of dislocation compounded by Puerto Rico’s ambiguous status as an unincorporated territory of the United States. The series Graft, which means to move living tissue from one place to another, to imagine the transplant of my homeland to anywhere on the mainland.

Puerto Rico’s current cultural identity has been intrinsically shaped by its historic affiliation with Spanish colonial military architecture, an alliance that expired 126 years ago. As my traveling to and from Puerto Rico intensified throughout the years, I kept asking myself, “Why does this reference and build identity to the archipelago live in the foreground?” My work proposes to consider the cultural and historical value of residential architecture from working-class Puerto Rico. Understanding the cultural value of the decorative motifs that embody working-class homes can influence Puerto Ricans to consider where they........

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