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I Want to be Soft retraces the steps of a child through the Webb Chapel/Bachman Lake area of Dallas in the mid-to-late-nineties. The artist, Nora Soto (she/her), was that child. Now she’s an organizer in the same city who understands why she had so much to carry when she was little.



 
Webb Chapel is historically a Hispanic, low-income area in North Dallas that has long deserved more resources — especially a cultural center, Nora says — and that’s the point of her first solo show. Not enough has changed there since she was a kid. Nora refers to a litmus question asked by the art critic John Berger in his early writing:

Does this work help or encourage [people] to know and claim their social rights?

“Before I’m an artist, I am an organizer,” Nora says. “I’m a medical interpreter at Parkland. Even in my job, I found a job that lets me do that, in some way ... I will find any way to further this work that I’m doing.”  

It makes sense that Nora spent formative years in two disparate neighborhoods within the area. Her mom claimed an aunt’s address so her kids could go to better-funded schools. There, Nora struggled to fit in — “I was probably the only brown student in my class,” she remembers — until district officials found them out when Nora was in fourth grade, and sent her and her siblings to an under-served campus zoned for her home in an apartment complex on the west side of Marsh Lane. It was hard to adjust on both sides of that dividing street, she says, though these two worlds were so physically close.

While she worked on collages for this exhibition at 500X Gallery, Nora shared some reference photos she took of spots where she and her siblings spent the most time. Nora identifies each site and describes what happened there in the audio at the end of this post, excerpted from an hour-long Zoom call the evening of January 26, 2023, as part of a series of informal but intentional Q&As with artists focused on specific works. 

-- LTK



About I Want to be Soft
by Nora Soto

In a community where our basic needs are rarely met, the formation of our identity is forced to become centered around trauma. Our environment removes the opportunity for introspection in critical years that are meant for development. The ability to think about who we are and want to become is stifled. What doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger and can sure as hell steal your sense of self.

With the underserved area of Webb Chapel serving as my setting, I use my lived experience growing up during my developmental years to highlight the trauma of poverty, over policing, and inequity that continues to affect thousands of children in the neighborhood today.

The consequences of such an environment can be felt as a gradual hardening of the heart and mind; a never ending yearning to be soft again.

My process includes combining photography and collage to show how little has changed in 30 years. I walked through old paths rediscovering memories I had decided were best forgotten. This only further ignited my passion to keep pushing for the recognition of this area as one deserving of resources and attention.

It helped me realize how deserving I am of receiving care and forgiving myself for doing what I needed to do to survive.

About Nora:

Nora Soto is a feminist organizer and working artist born and raised in the Bachman Lake neighborhood of Dallas, Texas. Her organizing work is grounded in a vision of radical empathy and collective care against the carceral logic of 21st-century capitalism. Nora is a co-founder of Our City Our Future, an organizing collective dedicated to cities divesting in policing and investing in communities, and is a frequent collaborator of Cara Mia Theatre. Her work spans disciplines, and includes performance art, multimedia installations, collage, and community workshops in a variety of settings. Nora currently works as a medical interpreter and lives with her son Leo in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas.

Reference images for collages that will appear in I Want to be Soft: