Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisa C Soto.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I come from a Caribbean heritage where my grandparents on both sides of my family moved from Jamaica and Puerto Rico to New York City. My Jamaican grandparents moved to W. 148th Street where they raised their family and later moved to New Rochelle ending up in the Bronx. On my mother’s side, my Puerto Rican grandparents moved to the Projects in Spanish Harlem.
My parents were in the music business, which created a lot of movement in my formative years. I was born in Los Angeles where my father was venturing into the field of being a manager of Jazz musicians. Soon after I was born, we moved back to NY where my father discovered Roberta Flack and began to build his own managerial and booking agency. This led him to an opportunity to put on music festivals in the South of Spain. We moved to a small town on the Mediterranean coast when I was close to four years old with my younger sister, for nearly five years. My mother sang in jazz clubs as my father put on concerts with well-known musicians in the bullring of Puerto Banus and in luxury hotels along Costa del Sol. The pull of NY’s music scene brought us back as my father began to work with artists such as Taj Mahal, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, and moving into the Latino jazz world with artists such as Eddie Palmieri, Mongo Santamaria, and many others. As we grew up, we continued to spend full summers in our village in the South of Spain and the rest of the year in NY for school and work. Our world was filled with writer, painters, musicians, singers, ceramists, creatives of all types from all over the world.
I majored in Psychology, fulfilling familial expectations. Though my classes were in psychology, sociology, primate behavior, archeology, etc. my social life on campus took place in the art & architecture departments, and the music hall where I worked part-time. My move to Paris a year after graduating to attend the Alliançe Française secured the path I quietly began to forge experimenting with painting which later shifted into sculpture and installations.
Please tell us about your art.
My work is usually reflecting on the community from local to global. My resources have mostly come from systems of communication and mapping by global indigenous teachings starting with my Caribbean ancestry and extending to the teachings of First People’s on all continents. Including the Polynesian stick charts, the Andean algorithmic system of the Khipu, the Caribs & Dogon people’s astronomical teachings and the Aboriginal religio-cultural worldview known as Dreamtime. The work then extends to the macrocosm, where I am attempting to interpret the energetic connections or lines between the individual, populations, humankind and the universe, hence seeing the work as cloaks, portals, and force fields.
I base my aesthetic on a tension that is poised between fragility and strength. Using industrial materials such as hardware, wire, bullet shells, Mylar, fishing line, mirrors, and organic materials such as minerals, earth, and charcoal. The work is an effort to provide the viewer with experience through the placement of the installation and at times the incorporation of sound and motion. In the end, the work strives to convey an experience of the energy transmitted by our global and personal relationships.
Given everything that is going on in the world today, do you think the role of artists has changed? How do local, national or international events and issues affect your art?
I don’t think there is “a” role for all artists. Different artists take on particular roles based on their personal experiences, culture, environment, and opportunities. In terms of responding to what is happening in the world today, artists have always addressed local to global issues in their own manner. What I do think has changed is what kind of artists are being focused on. Artists of color around the world have been ignored throughout the different cycles of what we call the art world. Recently all of these White galleries, museums, curators, collectors, etc. are getting on the bandwagon of exhibiting and buying work by artists of color especially those artists whose work specifically discusses being Black/African, Indigenous, Latina(o), Latinx, etc. This is not so much a recognition of the strength, depth, and relevance of the work of these artists so much as another type of appropriation and colonization.
My movements locally, nationally and internationally influence my work and inadvertently the events happening in the places I spend time to get injected into my conversations. I am more interested in subtler observations of how we are connected and disconnected rather than headline news of the moment. My interest lies in our cyclical behaviors and the interruptions of these behaviors. The underlying conversations in my work are often suggesting an opposition to the well-established systems of divide and conquer and questioning our resistance to forging stronger bonds in our communities. Is it resistance or is it incited by particular acts? What does that look like? What are the harmonies and disharmonies in society’s of color, what is establishing them, what does that feel like?
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
My work is currently at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine. It is part of a group exhibition of over 50 contemporary Caribbean artists titled Relational Undercurrents, February 1 – May 5th, 2019.
My permanent outdoor installation in collaboration with Adjaye Associates can be seen along with 13 other artists works in Newark, NJ. 33 Littleton Ave, Newark, NJ.
All other works can be seen on my website: www.lisacsoto.com
Contact Info:
- Website: www.lisacsoto.com
- Instagram: Sotostudio_
Image Credit:
@dubarts, Argenis Apolinario, Christopher Wormald, Alan Schaffer, Max Weiner, Jonas Mohr, Jamaal Tolbert
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