Bio

Sofia Love is a multidisciplinary lesbian, Tejana artist living in New York. Love received her BFA in Integrated Design from Parsons School of Design (New York, NY) with a concentration in Fine Art and a minor in Latin American Art and Design History. Love had her debut solo exhibition ‘VAQUERA’ in March 2023 at Shelter Gallery (New York, NY). She has been in group shows at Shelter Gallery (New York, NY), smoke the moon (Santa Fe, NM), Heartfelt Gallery (New York, NY), and the Brooklyn LGBT Center (Brooklyn, NY). She has curated numerous exhibitions, including Woman on a Balcony, Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY), Summer Camp, Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY) and Picnic at Hanging Rock: Chapter II, Sargent’s Daughters (Los Angeles, CA). She is the host of two book clubs: Pocket Book Club at Sargent’s Daughters and Engagement Ring, a book club and literary organization for queer Latinos. Love was an Artist-in-Residence at Casa Na Ilha Artist Residency (Ilhabela, Brazil) in 2024. She will be an Artist-in-Residence at Buinho Residency (Messejana, Portugal) in October 2025. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Artist statement

Born and raised in Boston, MA, but with deep family ties to the Mexican border town of Laredo, TX, Sofia Love’s acrylic paintings serve as a negotiation between ancestral memory and contemporary identity. The cowgirl (or vaquera) recurs throughout her practice – gun slinging, brown, and frequently nude – framed by expanses of desert. She’s a real, historical cowgirl. She’s the artist traversing her own imagination. For Love, vaquera is an object of desire and an extension of herself.

While Love creates traditional canvases, the majority of her works take the form of nichos, intimate yet elaborately decorated altars that can be found in homes across Mexico. Dedicated to deceased ancestors or particular saints, nichos blend folk spirituality with Catholicism, smuggling pre-Colombian vernacular traditions into contemporary, Westernized culture. Love’s nichos draw on this history to produce art objects that exist at the border of painting and sculpture, with frames that extend the content and imagery of the paintings they enshrine.

The resulting works each have interiors and exteriors, the painting and the frame, in which ambivalent scenes are surrounded by totems and animals that seem to hint at the psychological subtext of the central image. Figures reappear across the framed nichos like characters in a narrative. Skulls, moths, storks tell stories that are only partially legible from an external perspective. Like the vaquera herself, Love’s layered compositions refuse any easy interpretation.