Layla Love wants to make art that could stop wars

 The Butterfly Effect Series represents a cornerstone of Layla Love’s artistic journey, spanning 15 transformative years.

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST April 14th, 2026

Layla Love wants to make art that could stop wars.

Layla Love had just been coating photographs in molten glass for a show in Tokyo when we talked as I put together info for this piece. She was elusive with details, explaining, “The process is a ritual, there are many elements.” Indeed, her doing can be complex, as it was with Maria Callas, a portrait of the Italian prima donna, which began as a collaboration with a partner, Giorgio Casu. They both adored Callas for many years, seeing great mystique in her extraordinary vocal range, I observed, “Exploring what resonant sonics can really procure.” Again, with minimal explanation, “The final piece is a mixed-media painting layered with my photography,” she said. “Then the gold sublimation.”

There was the piece Love made in collaboration with the artist Android Jones. “It was a photograph we created through a long exposure,” she says. “And we did light-mapping. That’s where you paint with light.” Or Love’s photograph of a hand. “It was originally a photograph of my best friend who was a filmmaker,” she says. “First, you do the photograph, then you do the painting, then you photograph the painting, then you put that on another surface. Something interesting.”

However well the process has gone, Love says she will never replicate it in another piece.  

Had she always worked like that before?  

“Yes. From the very beginning. I have traveled my whole life, photographing scenes from all alleys, even the dark ones. I’ve seen so many different talents and cultures, tasted many fruits, it’s exciting for me to always be doing different things. I guess I find repetition boring.”

Indeed, it had been with a camera that her art-making career began. “When I was seven, I got my first camera from my mother,” she says. “It was a little point-and-shoot.” Where was this? “Miami. We were living in Little Cuba, Little Havana, and I always thought everything was beautiful and simultaneously fleeting, so I photographed everything. I became obsessed. It was a way of holding onto people I loved. I made my first photo album at seven. And I photographed all sorts of things, especially peacocks. I was always looking for water and sky. I started making albums, and I never stopped.”  

How often does a piece go wrong?
“Never,” Love said. She added, “It’s not finished till it goes right. I’ve never given up on a piece.”

What’s the longest she’ll work on one?

“I’m doing a lot of different techniques,” Love said. “Some of them are very fast, and some take a long time, like some of the bigger butterfly paintings.” That project had begun after she finished college in London and went to California. Love had taken a great liking to the Monarchs after a visceral experience feeding one from her fingertips in Malaysia with smashed banana on a school trip abroad.  “They migrate to Santa Cruz so I went to Santa Cruz,” she said. “I had a job teaching art to autistic children, I took them into the forest to see all the Monarch butterflies, they were so extraordinary. To see it through their eyes was so tender and illuminating. That was the beginning of the love affair,” she said. “Butterflies are the only creatures that go into a rebirth without dying. It’s a great mystery and a beautiful metaphor.” Evidently, for Love a piece could take a lifetime.

Love made the butterfly the central image of her first exhibited artwork. This was an enlarged black-and-white photographic negative, and she took it to a New York art space, Collective Hardware, as she booked a placement on the second floor on a little wall next to the hair salon, “I was so unprofessional that I was carrying it without it being wrapped,” she said. A show was being installed on the first floor produced by Amy Rosi, An acclaimed art curator, under the title “The Black and White Show”. Are you seeing where this is going? After some time and acclimation, Rosi turned to Love, “You know what? The Basquiat that was expected didn’t show up.” She eyed Love’s piece. In an in-person interview on 57th with both in December 2025, [she said], “We decided to put it up." Love observes, “This moment transformed my life."” Rosi adds, “And the butterfly became the defining image in the whole show.”

Layla Love went on to define herself as the butterfly. Born and then born again, emerging life from the dark.  

“The Black and White Show,” featuring Jackson Pollock, Robert Mapplethorpe, Warhol, and others, indubitably hard launching her career, Love then produced over 100 shows and exhibitions, showcasing alongside some of the greatest faces of our generation and the last. Including Shepard Fairey, Picasso, Kara Walker, Keith Haring, Annie Leibovitz, and many more. Engraving a lasting legacy in serving art with a purpose.

Love greatly admires Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer who established street photography as a significant form and who famously described his working method as “Picking the decisive moment.” Of which he said, "Inside movement there is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance." Love's own decisive moments can be the capture of a mood, as with the broody female in Dour, Love just catches a foot to the jaw amidst a brutal mosh pit, or the match of a mood with an arresting location, as with the untrusting look on the face of the girl in Bendy Corridor. She can certainly produce an eye-catcher, such as the shot of a young woman sharing the floor with a tiger, which, however, is approaching the photographer. Love’s human subjects are very often women. And when they are naked, as they often are, they are not erotic fodder for the male gaze but possess strong presence, messaging, “Look! This is the real me.” This is the real moment.

The moment… is then the movement.

Layla’s captures are the pave way to real change.

"Through art, we bridge the tangible and intangible elements of existence, seeking that which transcends words. It is during these moments when language falls short that I turn to art, expressing emotions and experiences that elude verbal expression. The ethos is one of reverence for our world and all of its people. Art loses its ego when paired with purpose, and therein an understanding that art changes people, and that people change the world.”

Layla's work provides a spectacle into the intangible world. Working with various precious materials, she portrays the intricacies of our existence with many critical layering details going beyond what meets the eye. 

Art imitates life. 

The Butterfly Effect Series represents a cornerstone of Layla Love’s artistic journey, spanning 15 transformative years.

Layla Love, Reff Revival Collection
 

Opposite the pendulum, her photography branches. Sometimes a more tangible world, showcasing the raw, authentic, and sometimes bloody world in which we live. Duality is a topic of great exploration for Layla. Some works focusenlightening and materialize the inner self; others put a lens on the state of the world. And her Heart, is 24k gold, just like this sculpture,

I ask, “Why gold in so many of your works?” Noting on “Metamorphosis”. Love tells me, "My journey with implementing gold in my artwork began in 2015 while working with Alex Sastoque in Bogota, Colombia, where we were using liquid gold to paint statuesque women whom I would then photograph in salt caves over a mile deep into the eARTh. Amongst the salt deposits, we wedged a sculpture entitled “Metamorphosis.” I felt honored to be able to interpret this sculpture through photography and share it with the world. The sculpture was made of a gun from rebel soldiers welded to a shovel, which was then dipped in 24-karat gold. I was so moved by each machine's differences and similarities, their juxtaposition, that when brought together under a layer of gold, it became something precious, they became synonymous, both metaphorically and literally.”

Love and Sastoque presented their piece to the president of Colombia at the time, through mutual connections of Sastoque’s. They spoke of their journey, advocations, and destiny, eventually agreeing for the sculpture to be used representatively during Colombia’s Independence Day parade run in 2015 commemorating the ceasefire between the FARC rebels and the Colombian government. Signifying a Cultural milestone for Colombia, the art world, and Love’s career as a true advocate for the voiceless.

Love travelled most of her life, especially into her professional career. Following her own unique ebb and flow of her artistry and person, through metamorphosis of all phases and eras of being, focusing her craft, and her character. "There had to be purpose"… Putting herself on the front lines of war zones, rural dead-zones, and spiritual tribulations, Love has held hand in hand with what most of us only know to be conspiracy. Man without laws and sometimes fear. Women with no eyes, sometimes intentionally as it kept them purified from the hands that sought to take them. “Why did you do it?” I asked. Love took a moment, “At that time I didn’t care much if I lived or died, I figured there had to be a way to make this vessel worth its creation in the meantime.” Following, “Don McCullin’s works very much inspired me as well. I don’t know, at this moment, it felt like all things colliding, like a fate I could feel within me, it was just my calling.”  It was at this moment, for Love, of which all elements in motion were in balance. Love trademarked “Rise of the Butterfly” following suit, bringing together artists and speakers for an international exhibition that has premiered in over 20 productions to inspire real change and to showcase these voices, and these lives, and these works Love dedicated her life to pursuing. Forwarding profits to their partnered organizations like “Voices4Freedom” to support victims of trafficking. 

One notable memoir from Love’s expedition, she speaks of her residency at a children’s orphanage for the terminally ill in Kolkata, India. “I volunteered, room and board of course. I would do various menial tasks around, take photos that we could use to apply for grants—that was nice—but there would be times I would spend with these kids, realizing their death was imminent. I still felt every moment of love I shared with them was worth something; it was in the air between us, and we both knew. To share that feeling with another, eye to eye, is world-shifting.”

Eventually, “We had to… slow operations.”

The tides turned, and the moon coincided. Love had to shift her perspective. She had to find a different way to invest her message.

Love turned to the other side of the pendulum. She found that what she was looking for this whole time, was the beauty. The beauty in all of it—all of the pain, war, crime, and loss—there was always something to take away, horrifically yet beautifully, but this wasn’t for everyone. Many turn a blind eye as it’s not for the faint of heart.  Love recognized this, and in traveling abroad recognized her profound love for the ocean. 

Love has now adjoined her foundation Reef Revival and partnering NGO Global Coralition, with founders and long-time friends Angeline Chen and Kyle Block, both pushing hard for ocean advocacy and conservation through art, to The World Foundation of Peace and Sustainability (WFPS). In this enchanting trilogy, Love, Sandeep J. Shah, the founder of WFPS, and the leaders at Global Coralition, come together to platform art paired with purpose like the world has yet to see. The team is designing a large-scale coral propagating sculpture that will break the world record as the tallest underwater sculpture in the world, deployed in Lakshadweep, India, a site identified by the 50 Reefs study as one of the most optimal reefs to conserve and restore. Following, an opening gala and a further 10-city global exhibition tour, all highlighting the greatest artists, speakers, performers and advocates in ecology and sustainable innovation. Read more in my previous article, and more to come.

Layla Love, Ink Stains Collection