Francisco Correa Cordero, Founder of New York’s Lubov Gallery, Dead at 37
6Aug. 4, 2026
Francisco Correa Cordero, whose ten-year-oldLubovgallery was a beacon for emerging artists, died on August 2 in a Manhattan hospital. He was thirty-seven. His death was announced by his gallery in an Instagram post, which noted that Cordero “passed away peacefully surrounded by what he loved the most—his chosen family, laughter and so much love.” No cause of death was given.Artforumhas reached out toLubovfor comment. Firmly embedded in the community he served, the charismatic Cordero was possessed of a keen eye for rising talent and a passion for staging exciting, unusual, and inclusive events, such as aforty-eight hour haircutting marathonin which a cadre of artists and others who had never before wielded clippers barbered willing gallery goers.
“He created an atmosphere that was very magnetic,” painter Kevin Tobin, the subject of two solo exhibitions at Lubov, toldArtnet News. “There wasn’t anyone else like him.”
“He accomplished and lived for his dream through the gallery of a safe and meaningful community for artists,” wrote his gallery on Instagram. “What he built through Lubov will be felt through the art community forever.”
Francisco Correa Cordero was born on July 14, 1989, and raised in Mexico. After moving to the United States in 2007 to study photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York, he took on a variety of art-world jobs, variously working at and curating exhibitions for Aperture, the Richard Avedon Foundation, Exit Art, Humble Arts Foundation, Martos Gallery, and Yancey Richardson Gallery.
In 2015, Cordero was appointed executive coordinator at Independent Curators International (ICI). He founded Lubov gallery in 2016, named for his then-wife, Lviv-born artist Luba Drozd, whose given name, Lubov, means “love” in Russian. The gallery was launched with the New York debut of Boris Ostrerov, a Chicago-based painter known for heavily impastoed abstract works. Lubov initially occupied a second-floor space at 373 Broadway in TriBeCa, years before the neighborhood became the bustling art hub it is today.
The gallery was a buzzy hit, and Cordero soon expanded his remit, peppering his roster of emerging artists with well-known names. Among the artists who showed at the gallery are Mira Dayal, Eunnam Hong, Parker Ito, Dennis Kardon, Bryce Kroll, Shannon Cartier Lucy, Andres Serrano, and Xingzi Gu. Dayal, who received her first solo exhibition at the gallery, recalled Cordero’s enthusiasm and commitment to hard work in an email to Artnews.
“I wanted to work with him specifically because he was one of the few people supporting labor-intensive, site-specific, and commercially irreverent work, and he was also kind and curious,” said Dayal. “It is particularly challenging to run that kind of program, especially while also working for another organization, and so it was exciting to see how he expanded the gallery and its community over the years.”
In 2019, Cordero moved the gallery to a fourth-floor walkup at 5 East Broadway, in nearby Chinatown. He found the space on Craigslist. “[It] was cheap enough that I could afford it with the salary from my day job without having to rely on sales,” he explained in a 2023 Brooklyn Rail piece. “The fact that it was falling apart was actually an advantage. It’s important that I don’t feel too precious about the space; it needs to be flexible because the gallery works with many installation artists.”
Cordero left his role with ICI in 2022. At his death, he served on the board of KAJE, a nonprofit exhibition space in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood. Money grew tighter after Cordero quit his day job; additionally, he was forced to contend with the same forces small, midsize, and even large galleries around the world must reckon with today, including skyrocketing costs, an unstable economy, and collectors’ changing tastes and buying habits.
Despite these woes, Cordero kept the gallery running. Recent exhibitions at Lubov include those by Italian-Bosnian artist Adelisa Selimbašić, Beijing-born painter Sharon Xinran Zhang, and Los Angeles–based performance group My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade), making their first solo New York appearance since their participation in the 2021 Whitney Biennial. A show of work by New Orleans–born painter Kane Huynh is listed for the fall.
Cordero explained his curatorial goals to the Rail. “It’s the work that produces a sensation that I haven’t felt before; usually somewhere between pleasure, discomfort, and curiosity, but that is difficult to identify and get rid of. I want to see work that brings to the surface a part of myself that I haven’t seen before,” he wrote, “and it is my hope that others experience something similar.”