2004: "Rouge Nations"
"Rogue Nations": Cuban & Chinese Artists was an exhibition curated by Antonio Eligio Fernandez (Tonel), Anjee Helstrup and David Spalding that examined conceptual approaches and links between contemporary artists that had a global perspective on art and politics outside of their respective communist home nations. I had four of my Post-Post Cuba Diaries print works included in the exhibition. In this series I used imagery and symbols inspired by multiple conflicted relationships with Cuba as a point of departure. The prints in this exhibit were produce in the Kala Print Studios in Berkeley, CA after my 1999 trip to Havana where I was a visiting artist at the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba.The exhibition featured works by Juan Carlos Alom, Felipe Dulzaides, Kattia Garcia Fayat, Nereida Garcia-Ferraz, Lilian Garcia-Roig, Manuel Pina, Juan Carlos Quintana, Song Dong, Tang Hui, Jose Toriac, Wang Qingsong, Yang Shaobin, Yang Zhenzhong, Yin Xiuzhen, Zhan Wang and Zhou Tiehai.The exhibition was held at the Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana Gallery in San Jose, CA from, July 28-September 4, 2004Catalog with curatorial essay and biographies-Length 12 pages, published by MACLA, Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, 2004
2004: Featured Hispanic Artist for the State of Florida
In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month in September, the governor of the state of Florida selects an artist each year to exhibit artwork in the State Capital Plaza Gallery. In 2004 I was invited to be the Feature Artist during the month-long celebrations and activities. Apart from showing some of my most recent on-sight Florida landscape paintings, I decided to respond to the month's Hispanic-centric theme by also exhibiting a series works on paper that were clearly about specific Latino-themed motifs and imagery. The Translation Trance series was based on iconic, high art images from the “Old World”-Spain (Velazquez) and the “New World”-Latin America, but more specifically, by various images of Meso-American stylized figurative sculptures. Most of these Translation Trance works were produced in Austin, Texas as a visiting artist at Strike Editions and at Coronado Studio’s Serie Project.
Note that many of the Translation Trance works are reproduced and explained in the publication Reflexciones: New Directions in Mexican American Studies, Neil Foley issue editor; published by CMAS UT Press 1997, cover image and p.71-76.
Work from this series is also included in a book titled Triumph of our Communities published by Bilingual Review/Press Hispanic Research Center, Arizona State University, 1995. Both can be ordered on Amazon.comIn addition, my print Translation Trance: La Infant Teotihuacana (from Serie II-1995) can be seen at serieproject.org
A Decade of Highlights: 2004-2014
Over the past year I have been working on two shows that each dealt with the idea of a decade. One was the “A Mysterious Clarity 2.0”, a show that brought back, but in updated form in 2014, the original 2004 grouping of Burggraf, Garcia-Roig & Messersmith at 621 Gallery’s show “A Mysterious Clarity” and the other is my upcoming (fall 2015) solo exhibition at Cernuda Arte in Coral Gables titled “In the Thick of It: A Decade of Painting in Florida”. The latter will have an exhibition catalog with a curatorial essay by Carol Damian, Director of the Frost Museum at FIU.Because I came to blogging later in my artistic career and because I have been actively working with the concept of a decade it made sense to me to use the decade theme here as a way to summarize highlights from my fairly recent past so as to better contextualize my current work for viewers. With this added back ground information, visitors to the studio news/blog will be able to better understand where I am coming from and where I might be going.I will be posting a series of entries grouped by chronological order starting from 2004. The subjects of the entries will mostly be important art-related events such as exhibitions, awards, reviews, residencies, or even a major new series of works...but there will also be occasional MISC entries just because:)
Hello and Introduction
When people ask me where I am from, I instantly respond, “Do you mean where I was born, where I grew up, or where I live now?” Cuba, Texas, Florida? All of them? None of them? Cuban? American? Cuban-American? Maybe I exist only on the Hyphen...where ever that is. I honestly do not yet have an answer to what seems like a simple question to most people but below is an attempt to summarize at least who I am as an artist: what I do & have done.BRIEF BIOGRAPHY: Lilian Garcia-RoigBorn in Havana, Cuba in 1966, I was raised and worked in Texas for 30 years but now live and work in Tallahassee, Florida. My latest works feature large-scale on-site painting installations of dense landscapes that overwhelm the viewer’s perceptual senses. Each individual painting is created over the course of the day in an intense wet-on-wet cumulative manner that underscores the complex nature of trying to capture first-hand the multidimensional and ever-changing experience of being in that specific location. My works are as much about the materiality of the paint and the physicality of the painting process as they are about mixing and mashing the illusionist possibilities of painting with its true abstract nature.I have shown nationally at such places as the Americas Society Gallery in NYC, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Art Museum of the Americas, both in Washington D.C and extensively in the south, especially in Texas and Florida. Internationally, I have shown at the Chopo Museum in Mexico City and Byblos Art Gallery in Verona, Italy.My MFA is from the University of Pennsylvania (1990) and my BFA is from Southern Methodist University (1988). From 1991 to 2000 I was a tenured Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin and in 2001 was a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of Art Practice before deciding to move to Tallahassee where I became the Director of Graduate Studies in Studio Art from 2002-2008. Currently I am a professor at FSU where I serve as Chair of the Department of Art.Major awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts-Fine Arts, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting, a Mid-America Arts Alliance/NEA Fellowship Award in Painting, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship Award in painting, Blackwell Prize in Painting & a Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. Residencies include a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Artists Fellowship, MacDowell Colony Milton & Sally Avery Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Center AIR, Omi Milton and Sally Avery Fellow and a visiting artist at the Ludwig Foundation in Havana, Cuba.