For 48 consecutive hours in March 2025, Lubov turned its fourth-floor gallery into a hair salon where 70 artists and other creative people gave 86 haircuts as more than 500 visitors watched. Francisco Correa Cordero, the Mexican-born curator and gallerist who founded the downtown New York space, died on August 2, 2026. He was 37, according to Hyperallergic.

The salon was called Coda, and it distilled Correa Cordero's instinct for making a gallery into a place where art and ordinary life could meet. People arrived even before dawn. Haircuts were pay what you wished, and the volunteers worked in hourlong shifts. When Dazed asked how he had recruited so many people, his answer was direct: "I just texted people I knew, that's it." The scale came from the network he had built one relationship at a time.

Correa Cordero moved from Mexico to New York in 2007 and began his career studying photography and studio art. The turn toward curating grew from his interest in how other artists worked. "Artists bring an entirely different approach of conceiving shows and working around ideas," he told Artsy in 2018. He became a facilitator of new projects, public programs, and the relationships that allowed both to take shape.

He learned that work from many sides of the art world. Independent Curators International listed him as an executive coordinator and recorded earlier positions at Yancey Richardson Gallery, Martos Gallery, Aperture, Humble Arts Foundation, and the Richard Avedon Foundation. Beyond his day jobs, he assembled screenings, exhibitions, artist presentations, and panels. In 2014 he organized Lucid Methods, a discussion at EFA Project Space about how images acquire meaning. In August 2016 he and Gabriel H. Sanchez brought seven artists together at Recess for Nonspace, a one-night project shaped by virtual reality, 3D rendering, and digital culture.

That same year, Correa Cordero signed a lease on a small Tribeca room and opened Lubov. Its inaugural exhibition, a New York solo debut for Chicago painter Boris Ostrerov, began on November 12, 2016. The gallery's limitations became part of its energy. Artists painted murals, transformed walls, and treated the rooms as material rather than neutral background. What began as a weekend project grew into a durable home for experimental solo exhibitions and collaborations with writers and curators.

Lubov moved in 2019 to the meeting point of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, three flights above a restaurant. Correa Cordero valued the climb and the building's flexibility. "I can't resist letting artists take full control of the space, and this often guides the program of the gallery," he wrote in The Brooklyn Rail. His account of the gallery also connected its neighborhood to his own experience of carrying a piece of home across distance after leaving Mexico.

Across a decade, Lubov mounted exhibitions involving Mira Dayal, Shannon Cartier Lucy, Parker Ito, Bryce Kroll, Xingzi Gu, and many others. Correa Cordero extended the same attention beyond his own rooms through work with organizations including White Columns, Residency Unlimited, apexart, and EFA Project Space. He also served arts communities through KAJE, Carriage Trade, and the New Art Dealers Alliance. Each role drew on the same practical gift: bringing artists, ideas, spaces, and audiences into contact.

The fourth-floor rooms at Lubov, the exhibitions he organized across New York, and the artists who found an attentive partner in him form the clearest record of Correa Cordero's work. They preserve his conviction that a gallery could be intimate, flexible, and alive to surprise, whether it held paintings, an immersive installation, a public conversation, or 48 hours of haircuts.