Currently a visitor on ancestral Narragansett homeland (Providence, Rhode Island)
Craft

Recuérdame Bonito is a print-based project necessitating printshop access, travel expenses, and material costs to develop a new series of unique monoprints on hand-made paper. To create these collographs, akin to rubbings, Jonathan Herrera Soto adheres previously worn clothing onto a printing plate and uses the harsh and violent forces of a printing press to translate the information provided from the plate via ink onto the paper. The site-specificity of the project derives from the clothing itself, which will be acquired directly from migration trails and paths along the US southern border. Often the victims fleeing state-sanctioned crime, or their bodies, suffer anonymously behind fences, walls, in ditches, and leave behind the items they wear. They leave behind stories, not in words, but in remnants. For the project, Herrera Soto will follow the various migration paths of his father during his attempted crossings into the US in 2018.

As a print-based studio artist, Jonathan Herrera Soto approaches printmaking as an act of love through the gesture of translation. He graduated with a BFA from the Minneapolis College in Art and Design in 2017. Recent solo exhibitions of Herrera Soto’s work include “All at Once” at Brown University, “Always Tomorrow” at Hair and Nails Gallery in South Minneapolis, and “In Between / Underneath” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Herrera Soto is a recent recipient of the Santo Foundation Individual Artist Award, Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant, Metro Regional Arts Council Next Step Grant, Brown University Artist Initiative Grant, and the Jerome Hill Artist Grant Fellowship. He is a 2021-2023 Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow working towards an MFA at the Yale University School of Art.