Jonathan Herrera Soto: Twice the Legal Minute

Joseloff Gallery

February 22 – March 23, 2024

The Georgette and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts is an annual artist-in-residency program that brings prominent artists to teach at the Hartford Art School. During his tenure as the 2023-24 Koopman Chair in the Printmaking Department, Jonathan Herrera Soto has taught classes designed to prioritize the process of experimentation and play, focusing on collecting the misprints, which are often mistranslated in attempts to render an idea manifest. His pedagogical approach focuses on the little things: sketches, mistakes, uncertainties, and unfinished thoughts—an archive from which we learn and grow.

His solo exhibition in Joseloff Gallery, Twice the Legal Minute, brings together objects, memories, and systems that exist on the periphery of society to explore the visual language of accumulation, debris, and neglect. This exploration plays out at the scale of individual artworks—in the treatment of rust as paint, for example—and in the gallery at large through Herrera Soto’s distinctive approach to arranging installations. Akin to the layering of information that is fundamental to printmaking, the lessons to be drawn from Herrera Soto’s praxis are many, from the stakes of (mis)translation to plausibility as a survival strategy.  

The exhibition opens in Joseloff Gallery with a reception on Thursday, February 22, from 5 to 7 p.m.

The exhibition and associated programming are made possible by the Georgette and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts fund held by Hartford Art School Endowment, Inc.

Jonathan Herrera Soto (b. 1994) holds a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. He is a recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, and Yale Prison Education Initiative Fellowship. Herrera Soto has held solo exhibitions at Annex Gallery in Chicago, Duluth Art Institute, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Cohen Gallery at Brown University, and Hair and Nails Gallery in Minneapolis. His work will be featured in the upcoming group exhibition, No Bodies, at Real Art Ways in Hartford.