Generally speaking, you can’t sit on artwork in a museum. But in one of the galleries at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art — currently set up to look like a karaoke bar, complete with mirrored globe, stage and jukebox — three plastic chairs, upholstered with the face of the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny32, are waiting for you to rest between songs.
Part of the exhibition “Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón”, the chairs are the work of artist Edra Soto, who transforms objects from her childhood and elements of everyday design and architecture found in Puerto Rico into works and spaces that evoke life on the small island.
She has already installed square fans that cool families in the shape of Christian crosses; reinterpreted the colorful and ubiquitous iron fences that delimit the house and the street into imposing sculptures; and placed small keyholes in his sculptures that reveal silent photos of Puerto Rican homes in the interior.
“All of these objects are rooted in the home,” she said in a video call from her Chicago home, explaining that she always thinks of them “in a way that goes beyond their assigned function.”
Together, her works often create contemplative spaces, and lately she has delved more into the spiritual, with her own Catholic upbringing influencing the “tabernacle-like” atrium that is central to her current show at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, as well as her newest exhibition at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.
His series of BB chairs, produced over the past year and a half, perhaps represent a different kind of devotion as he has achieved impressive levels of fame. His 2022 album, “Un Verano Sin Ti,” is the most streamed album in Spotify’s 20-year history.
In “Dancing the Revolution,” he appears several times in the exhibition, dedicated to the visual history and political power of Caribbean music and dance.
The exhibition emerged after the summer of 2019, when mass protests against years of government corruption led to the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló — demonstrations in which Bad Bunny became a central figure as he paused his tour to join the movement.
In a monumental photograph in the exhibition, he appears raised above the crowd in San Juan, waving the Puerto Rican flag, reminiscent of Delacroix’s work “Liberty Leading the People”, explained curator Carla Acevedo-Yates during a guided tour of the exhibition.
For Soto, she was impressed by the intelligent and meaningful ways in which Bad Bunny communicates with Puerto Ricans — literally, as she recalled from her appearance on a local news program last year, when she presented major news and even the weather forecast.
His “BB Chairs” — covered in pirate-print fabrics featuring the singer wearing sunglasses and a buzz cut — were a humorous reference to both the island’s ubiquitous white plastic chair and the artist’s deep connection to his homeland.
In addition to appearing at the Kemper Museum and MCA Chicago, she arranged them on a pedestal with fans at the EXPO Chicago art fair last year, drawing crowds and television crews.
“I had this idea a whole year before I made them,” she said. “I was doubting myself. I thought maybe it was something very obvious.”
But friends came to Soto excitedly when Bad Bunny released the now historic Grammy-winning album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.” The album cover featured two empty white lawn chairs—an evocative symbol of home and belonging in Puerto Rico—and they also held significance for Soto’s artistic practice.
Over the past decade, she has covered plastic chairs with vibrant tablecloths printed with tigers and lush jungles, which have been displayed in shows and covered in art publications. Her chairs were inspired by her husband’s own furniture business, but with the realization that their materials would be different.
“The furniture I grew up with was wicker and plastic,” he explained. “I asked myself what my chair would look like if I were making a chair.” She said she couldn’t relate to fancy materials and began thinking about the fantasy of luxury in both the practice of upholstery and the colorful—if culturally inaccurate—images associated with the tropics.
It wasn’t that obvious, so she decided to put the face of Puerto Rico’s biggest star on the chairs. After all, they quickly became central to the singer’s own visual iconography and representative of the kitsch products that celebrities inspire when fandom becomes fervent. She recalled a store near her studio that was filled “from floor to ceiling” with images of his face on every product sold. “It was like a hallucination; it was incredible,” he said.
But that store no longer exists, and Soto bought the fabrics online for her set of chairs, about 15 in total. Since then, she hasn’t been able to find more of the same cloth—perhaps because of Bad Bunny’s popularity or copyright issues.
Because of this, the set unintentionally ended up being a limited edition for now, and at MCA Chicago, she re-coated them in plastic to keep them protected. Visitors can sit on them as they browse the exhibit — or during karaoke nights planned by the museum.
“I can’t recreate them exactly as they are. I love the quality of the cheap fabric, like a very specific aesthetic,” she said. At one point, she thought she had found the fabrics again, only to end up disappointed. “I actually placed another order and they never arrived. I don’t know what happened to my money,” he explained, laughing.
