“I always had the desire to create an exhibition space,” conceptual artist Edra Soto says. Offered a solo show at Northeastern Illinois University in 2012, Soto and her husband, Dan Sullivan—owner of Navillus Woodworks, which specializes in custom fabrication for art museums and galleries—imagined creating a structure to display their personal art collection. “The show would be an opportunity to comment on and talk about the artist-run spaces in Chicago. There’s a big community—people exhibiting in their loft or in their home or in their studio,” Sullivan says. With funding from NEIU, 3Arts, and the Propeller Fund, the pair constructed the Franklin—a modular exhibition space in the form of a shed—and installed it inside NEIU’s Fine Arts Center Gallery for “Living By Example,” a show of their acquisitions.
The next show at the Franklin, opening October 12, will be “Michael Milano: Smooth Times,” featuring experimental sound and moving image work by the SAIC alum.
