Bad Bunny chairs captivate art world

Three plastic chairs upholstered with the face of Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny are not roped off or behind glass. They sit in a gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, outfitted with bootleg fabric, waiting for visitors to sit on them between songs.

That’s unusual in a museum.

The gallery is currently staged to look like a karaoke bar — complete with a disco ball, stage, and jukebox — as part of the exhibition “Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón.”

The chairs are the work of Chicago-based artist Edra Soto. She turns the everyday objects of her childhood in Puerto Rico into spaces that evoke life on the small island. The artist has mounted flat box fans shaped like Christian crosses, built towering sculptures from the colorful ironwork fences that separate home from street, and hidden keyholes in her work that reveal quiet photos inside. “All these objects are rooted in the home,” she said in a video call from Chicago. She thinks about them “in a way that is higher than their assigned function.”

Soto’s work often creates quiet, contemplative spaces. Lately she’s leaned into the spiritual. Her Catholic upbringing shapes the “tabernacle-like” atrium central to her current show at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, and also appears in her newest exhibition at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.

The Bad Bunny chairs — or “BB chairs” — represent a different kind of devotion. The Puerto Rican singer has reached staggering levels of fame. His 2022 album “Un Verano Sin Ti” is the highest streamed album in Spotify’s 20-year history.

In the MCA exhibition, Bad Bunny appears multiple times. The show is dedicated to the visual history and political power of Caribbean music and dance. It came together after the summer of 2019, when mass protests over government corruption led to the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. He paused his tour to join the movement. One photo in the exhibition shows him standing above a crowd in San Juan waving the Puerto Rican flag — reminiscent of Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People,” curator Carla Acevedo-Yates explained during a walkthrough.

Soto said she’s been impressed with how the singer communicates to Puerto Ricans. She recalled his appearance on local news where he presented top stories and the weather forecast. Her chairs — fitted with bootleg fabric showing him wearing sunglasses and buzz cuts — are a tongue-in-cheek nod to the plastic white chair found everywhere on the island, and to the performer’s deep connection to home.

She arranged them on a pedestal with box fans at the art fair EXPO Chicago last year. They drew crowds and news cameras.

“I had this idea a whole year before I made them,” Soto said. “I was doubting myself. I was thinking maybe this is too on the nose.”

Then Bad Bunny released “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” the Grammy-winning album that made history. The album cover featured two empty white lawn chairs — an evocative symbol of home and belonging in Puerto Rico. The artist said friends immediately reached out to her. The chairs had significance to her practice, too.

Over the past decade, she upholstered plastic chairs with colorful towels of tigers and jungles for exhibitions. Her chairs were inspired by her husband’s furniture business, but she realized her materials would be different. “The furniture that I grew up with was wicker and plastic,” she said. “I asked myself what my chair would look like if I was making a chair.” She couldn’t relate to high-end materials.

She started thinking about the fantasy of luxury in upholstery and the culturally inaccurate images people associate with the tropics.

Splashing Bad Bunny’s face on the chairs didn’t feel too on the nose after all. His image had become central to his own visual iconography, and representative of the kitschy merchandise that appears when fandom turns fervent. She recalled a shop near her studio that was filled “top to bottom” with images of his face across all its merchandise. “It was (like) hallucinating; it was incredible.”

That shop no longer exists.

Soto bought the fabrics for her chairs online — some 15 in total. She hasn’t been able to find more of the same. She guesses it’s because of the singer’s popularity, or maybe copyright issues. That makes the set an unintentional limited edition. At the MCA Chicago, she upholstered them again in plastic to keep them safe. Visitors can sit while browsing the exhibition — or during the museum’s planned karaoke nights.

“I’m not able to recreate them the way they are. I love the quality of the cheap fabric, just as an aesthetic that is very specific,” she said. At one point she thought she found the fabric again. “I actually reordered and they never arrived. I don’t know what happened with my money,” she explained, laughing.