Sofia Love (b. 1999, Boston, MA) is a lesbian Tejana artist and art historian 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). Love was an Artist-in-Residence at Casa Na Ilha Artist Residency (Ilhabela, Brazil) in 2024 and an Artist-in-Residence at Buinho Residency (Messejana, Portugal) in 2025. She was Artist-in-Residence at Allende Arts Space (San Miguel de Allende, Mexico) and Apapacho PROArtes Residency (Mexico City, Mexico) in the Spring of 2026. Love is the current Head of Research + Community Development for art_works, a mission-based art advisory. She is a Masters of Art History candidate at Pratt Institute. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Artist statement

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 framed by expanses of mythical desert along with the stork (or garza) as a symbol for her maternal family whose surname is Garza. She’s a real, historical cowgirl. For Love, the vaquera is an object of desire and an extension of herself.

There is a rich history of queer cowboys or vaqueros throughout the Southwest and Mexico, but they are often excluded from the Westernized narrative of the idealized cowboy who are white, attractive, vigilantes who are simultaneously outlaws and purveyors of the United States' colonial expansion. Love’s family has a long legacy of being vaqueros and farmhands in the border region of Laredo, TX and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Her work explores the way Love and her ancestors have navigated imaginary borders, both national and ethnic. By subverting the folklore tradition of Tejanos, she is able to reimagine these queer vaqueros in their fictitious utopia straddling the Texan and Mexican desert– a contemporary Atzlán (the mystical birthplace of the Mexica/Aztec people). 

Love’s work takes 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.