ABOUT

Sophia del Rio born in 1982 in Austin, TX, watched the idealistic hippie generation of her parents sell-out and trade-in civil rights for profit. She set out like many people in her generation to attend an enormous amount of college, achieving a Masters Degree in Neuroscience. However the 2008 financial crash turned the job market into a hollow landscape of unpaid internships, crippling gig-economy work or corporate contract work. The second blow was yet to come and resulted from the 2020 pandemic sending her generation into a spiral uncertainty. The job security her parents had enjoyed was gone.

Sophia's art work is a social practice focused on her generation's precarious future, and attempts to address her generation's need for its own artistic documentation of experience in lasting, slow media, like painting and ceramics. She believes in the power of handmade objects that last, and studied at world-class craft schools; The Southwestern School of Art, Mesa Art Center, and Anderson Ranch, as well as studied at Tamarind Institutes' Summer Workshop.

Unlike her contemporaries who largely focus on individualism, she remains dedicated to stoking the fire of universalism and collective bargaining. In her own life, outside of the studio, she has led a tenants' union of 1,000 families, conducted petitions directed at local politicians, corporate landlords and state agencies, and frequently speaks to her City Council.  Her upcoming body of work focuses on the global corporate landscape, its gaslighting techniques and virtual zoom-rooms that separate us from our humanity.