2026: Buffalo AKG group show
Super excited & honored to be included in this show alongside so many artists I have long admired-
Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way , curated by Andrea Alvarez, explores contemporary Latinx artists’ innovations and interventions within established traditions of painting, inviting discussion on a variety of themes and revealing the diversity and expansiveness present within the field. The fifty-eight artists in the exhibition—and those in the Latinx field more broadly—encourage us to interrogate the continued relevance of boundaries, from political borders to disciplinary confines. This exhibition therefore celebrates artists whose expressions are first and foremost personal and subjective, but whose heterogeneous and culturally specific interventions enrich one another and the history of American and contemporary art, two fields from which such artists have been historically excluded. Inspired by former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem “[Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way],” the show celebrates abundance and presents a vision of Latinx art that is, like the diaspora itself, infinitely complex.
ABOVE: “Hyphenated Nature: Northern Florida-Cuban Painting Relations (after Carta)”, 30” x 78”. (left & right are on-site , oil on canvas paintings & middle is acrylic & handmade Cuban soil-pigment on canvas (2020) and is my contribution to the “Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way” exhibition.
For years I have been searching for ways to hyphenate my perceptually based on-site painting practice with my conceptually based interest in connecting with the Cuban landscape and with the history of the Cuban artists who painted it. This triptych is composed of two Northern Florida paintings made “en plein-air” over the course an entire day at St Mark‘s Nature Preserve, which bookend an Albers-based square work that has an image of a Cuban landscape painted by using Cuban soil pigment. This middle piece is based on a famous painting “Las Malangas” by Valentin Sanz Carta that is in El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana. I originally saw this painting on my first visit to Cuba in 1999 and was immediately drawn to it. I chose to use this piece as the hyphenation for my two on-site works because I saw elements in the Carta painting in each of my works. - The painting on the left was of a creek with tannic waters surrounded by dense vegetation and trunks leading over it. The work on the right had a sable palm that was similar to the ones in the Carta painting.
I created my Albers Square grid foundation by pulling colors from my on-site paintings and then repainted a section of the Carta work using actual Cuban soil, which I ground-up by hand into pigment. By literally superimposing “Cuba” (in the form of soil/pigment) on Western Bauhausian modernism, I embraced the modernist grid while simultaneously bursting out of it and rejecting it with the Cuban vernacular landscape, and in so doing found a new culturally and pictorially hyphenated space to paint.
The show’s intergenerational and regionally broad dialogue is reflected in seven thematic groupings: (New) Histories, offering new perspectives on personal, cultural, and global histories; Bodies & Figures, representations of and by marginalized people, considering the importance of the body, and who is or isn’t seen in an image; Identity/Place, a consideration of how identity and place shape each other with a diasporic lens; Land/tierra, varied approaches to land and the built environment, from the material to the imaginary; Community, highlighting various communities—artistic, blood, and chosen—and their importance to populations within the diaspora; Pinturx, contemporary Latinx approaches to traditional painting genres like still life and portraiture; and Abstractions, exploring centuries-long Indigenous and European abstract traditions still in use by artists today.
Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and curated by Curator Andrea Alvarez. It will be followed by a national tour including presentations at the Des Moines Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle.
In Nature’s Studio: Two Centuries of American Landscape Painting
This core show is organized by the Reading Public Museum, Reading Pennsylvania and augmented by landscape-themed works from the permanent collection of the Art Museum of South Texas. It runs January 22- May 3, 2026.
Works in the Reading collection combine early depictions of bucolic North American vistas—intimate forest interiors, sweeping panoramic views of natural wonders, and dramatic images of the untamed land and sea—with scenes of Europe, the Near East, and South America.
In addition to works by nineteenth-century landscape artists such as Thomas Birch, Frederic Church, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Worthington Whittredge, William Trost Richards, Hermann Herzog, and Aaron Draper Shattuck, the exhibition also examines the late-nineteenth century shift to Impressionism and Tonalism at the turn of the century by painters including George Inness, N. C. Wyeth, Childe Hassam, Edward Willis Redfield, John Fulton Folinsbee, John Mulhaupt and Robert Spencer. These movements captured the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere by employing new and innovative techniques including painting out-of-doors, en plein air.
Cumulative Nature: Layered View (WA) , 48” x 36”, oil on canvas, 2008 (in the permanent collection of the Art Museum of South Texas)
The expanded exhibition explores the progression from naturalistic depictions of pastoral landscapes to the stylized and individual impressions of time and place reflect the sensibilities of visual culture in the United States over the course of two centuries. The on-site (en plein air) painting above is my piece in this show.
Twenty-One Distinguished Artists of the 21st Century
is a showcase of 21 Cuban contemporary artists from rising mid-career to international masters.
This event highlights over 75 works, including paintings, sculptures and assemblages by the most exciting voices in today’s global art scene.
Artists include:
Alfredo Sosabravo, Manuel Mendive, Julio Larraz, Clara Morera, Humberto Calzada, Tomás Sánchez, Roberto Fabelo, DEMI, José Bedia, Lilian Garcia-Roig, Belkis Ayón, Joel Besmar, Juan Roberto Diago, Vicente Hernández, Giosvany Echevarría, Jorge Luis Santos, Enrique Casas, Irina Elén González, Miguel Florido, Yasiel Elizagaray and Danuel Méndez.
Show opens March 6 at Cernuda Arte, 3155 Ponce de Leon Blvd. Coral Gables, FL 33134
M-F: 10-6pm & Sat: 12-5. 305-461-1063
2009: Space; Unlimited (AMOA)
Space; Unlimited was a collaborative curatorial exhibition at the Art Museum of the Americas (AMOA) which is part of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington D.C. The exhibition opened February 21 and ran through April 12, 2009. It was the most visited exhibition of contemporary art the museum had ever had and it was widely, and positively reviewed...so much so that a museum in Mexico City asked to try to have a version of the show go there. Below is a small pdf of the exhibition brochure that includes two brief curatorial essays ("Resounding Space" and "Mediums Unbounded") by each of the curators: Laura Roulet, an independent curator from the DC area and Tatiana Flores, Art History associate professor at Rutgers University. See small pdf below to read their essays.AMOAbrochureDCABOUT THE EXHIBIT: Space, Unlimited includes the work of seven contemporary artists who challenge the boundaries of physical, perceptual or psychological space. Through a variety of mediums, from painting and photography to assemblage and video, these artists defy expectations that may be traditionally imposed over the form or content of their work or their artistic identities.FEATURED ARTISTS: Guerra de la Paz, Lilian Garcia-Roig, Magdalena Fernández, Angela Bonadies, Ara Ararauna, Ada Bobonis, Nayda Collazo-Llorens.*A web link to the Art Museum of the America's webpage archive of this show is below:http://museum.oas.org/exhibitions/2000s/2009-space.html*In addition, below is a small pdf of the AMOA's website that shoed an example of each art it's work in the show.AMOAwebSU*Below is a small pdf of the Washington Post's front page Arts section review of "Space; Unlimited" by Jessica Dawson.AMOASpace,UnlimitedWashPost*Below is a pdf of Terri Weissman Art Nexus review of "Space; Unlimited"ArtNexusDCNews
2009: Nature of Being There
I was invited to have a solo show in January of 2009 at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (in what then called Edison College) in Ft. Myers, FL. This is an amazing and vast space that is used by the university and community as an arts center with an active regional and national roster of exhibits but it was originally designed and funded by Bob Rauschenberg, in part, so that he could have a proper place to show his monumental works that was close to his studio. I was able to show a different configuration of my Hyperbolic Nature: Northern Florida Series that I originally conceived for the Huntsville Museun the year prior as well as most of my larger-scale painting grouping from WA, NH and FL.
2009: Florida Museum of Women Artists
I was invited to be in the Inaugural Exhibition of the Florida Museun of Women Artist in Deland, FL which took place in the fall of 2009. My painting, Cumulative Nature: Serpentine Vines (FL) triptych, won a juror's award.
2009: Into the Wild
In October 2009, Carol Jazzar Gallery in Miami presented Into The Wild, a group exhibition of figurative and abstract painting and sculpture from local and national artists working with nature. Echoing the current revival of nature-based subject matter each artists plumbs the depths of personal experience, reacting and representing their impressions with fervor. From gestual forays to labor intensive and methodical systems the exhibition not only resonates aesthetically, but also by virtue of the many processes involved is analogous itself to an ecological web. The exhibition featured works by Ai Kijima, Elizabeth Condon, John DeFaro, Luis Garcia-Nerey, Lilian Garcia-Roig, Enrique Gomez De Molina, Juanita Meneses and Michelle Weinberg.
2008: MacDowell Gala
I was honored to be one of a handful of recent resident colony artists asked to show images of their works as part of the program for the annual MacDowell Colony National benefit in New York City at 7 World Trade Center. Jane Alexander was being honored for her outstanding contributions and service as an advocate for the arts.
Five of my new NH on-site paintings completed during my fall 2008 residency. Each painting is 60" x 48"
2008: Two Texas Solos Shows
Into the Woods was the title of a solo show of recent groupings of WA, FL, NH & TX on-site paintings that opened at the Grace Museum in Abilene, TX in July and then traveled to the Michelson Museum in Marshall, TX in September. You can see some images from that show from the Grace Museum on my webpage under "Gallery Views".
2008: Bridge Fair in Miami
Carol Jazzar showed my recent FL paintings at Bridge fair during Miami Beach Art Basel fair week.
2008: MacDowell Colony Residency again!
After the great strides I made with my works during my too-short, one-month, fall residency at MacDowell in 2006 I was determined to return to take up where I left off. In that short but highly productive residency, I was able to increase the intensity and variety of the color palette I could use due to the spectacular fall foliage and was able to extend the act of painting to a full-day's length which allowed the process of applying paint to become a performative act. I was also able to successfully increase the scale of my final works to 60" x 48" and now I wanted to make an entire series of these larger paintings that would use the fall palette. Luckily I was able to do just that, in part because I was granted my first sabbatical in the fall of 2008 and I was simultaneous accepted back to the MacDowell Colony that fall.
2008: Mysterious Clarity(s)
New versions of A Mysterious Clarity kept being requested in 2008 we showed at the Brevard Museum in Melbourne, FL but in May-July we had the biggest version yet at The Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo, FL . I thought it was the best version of the show so far, in large part because of the beautiful, large space that let the works breath and flow like they had never been able to before. Below are some images from that show but I have more on on webpage under "Gallery Views" 
Below is a small pdf of the brochure the Gulf Coast Museum of Art produced for the exhibition.2008MCgalleryguide2pdf
2008: Huntsville Museum
The Encounters series of solo exhibitions at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, AL, is designed to highlight outstanding regional contemporary art and they are organized by Peter J. Baldaia, the Director of Curatorial Affairs at the museum. I was invited to be part of this series after my 5’ X 12’ triptych titled Fall Paths (NH) was awarded First Place by the juror and also won the People’s Choice Award from the general audience at the museum's Red Clay Survey show in 2007. This was the first time in the show’s long history that both awards had been given to the same work. My work turned out to so popular that the director invited me to have a solo show the following year. The main gallery was very large and the back space lent itself to be configured into an installation space so over the course of the year, I was able to create a my largest installation to date: fifteen on-site Florida paintings (each 60"H X 48"W) that I titled the Hyperbolic Nature: Northern Florida Series for the museum. Below are some images from that show but more can be seen on on web page under "Gallery Views".
The image below is of the painting that the museum purchased for their permanent collection. The work was created on-site in Paint Rock, AL, just north of Huntsville, during my week-ling working visit to a private 3000 acre nature and hunting conservation area in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains that the museum's staff was able to arrange for me. The link below will down load a 6.6 MB pdf file of the Huntsville Museum's Encounters catalog that contains an extensive Q&A essay conducted by Peter Baldaia.2008HuntsvilleCatalogSM
2008: Florida Individual Artist Fellow
In 2008 I was awarded a highly competitive STATE OF FLORIDA INDIVIDUAL ARTIST FELLOWSHIP which came with a $5000 award. You can see my profile and read more about this program by going to the Division Of Cultural Affair's link below.http://dos.myflorida.com/cultural/grants/grant-programs/individual-artist-fellowship/fellowship-recipients/profiles/lilian-garcia-roig/
2008: "More Is More" in Italy
The More Is More: Maximalist tendencies in Contemporary Painting show that opened at the FSU Museum in 2007 had a wonderful 64 page catalog that included a curatorial essay by the curator, Tatiana Flores, and this catalog somehow made its way into the hands of an Italian gallery director named Masha at Byblos Art Gallery in Verona, Italy. She invited a 5 of the artists in the original show to exhibit a new version of that exhibition in her space."The group of artists in "More is More" that is on exhibit at Byblos Art Gallery in Verona, Italy (from May 9 to July 26, 2008) share in a "maximalist" dialog that allows them to mix and mash different styles and images in ways that create a nonlinear look and reading of their works.All these artists employ seemingly contradictory approaches to image making in order to convey a type of post-modern truth and vision in their works. They incorporate elements of the art of the past with those of the present, look to the West and East, try to overcome boundaries between high and low culture, between text and image and even try to reconcile representation with abstraction in a single work.The works of Lilian Garcia-Roig, James Barsness, Clayton Brothers, Mark Messersmith and Grant Miller, therefore, are characterized by a taste for excess in both image, reading and materials, the overhead of composition that emphasizes the exuberance of the narrative, passionate gestural strokes. Each of these maximalist paintings demands the utmost attention from the viewer, as they sweep us from surfaces to surface, each so full of images, paint and narratives, that we left speechless."-Italian Press
2008: New American Paintings #76
My works were selected again for inclusion in New American Paintings! Peter Boswell, the senior curator at the Miami Art Museum, was the juror NAP #76 (souther region) in June/July 2008. He specifically commented "on how I use the tactility of the paint medium to create tension between the materiality of my means and the three-demensionality of my imagery". My works are found on pages 76-79.Volume 13, Issue 3, ISSN 1066-2235
2007: Cumulative Nature
In 2007 I became represented by Carol Jazzar Gallery in Miami. She wanted me to create a new installation of 48" x 36" FL paintings for a my solo show with her in December. The result was Cumulative Nature: North Florida, my first true “passing of the day” one-day, all-day paintings.The show was reviewed in numerous publications during the Miami Beach Art Basel Fair week and below is a pdf of a review in Art Nexus magazine.CNArtNexusRev2007
2007: Painted Woods
This was my fifth solo show at Valley House Gallery in Dallas and they produced a catalog for the show that included a curatorial essay by Tatiana Flores. The exhibition titled Painted Woods, included many of the works from WA that were in the Thick Brush Painting Installation show I had a few months prior at the MAC in Dallas. There were also works from my recent residency at the MacDowell Colony in NH & new paintings from my northern FL "backyard".
Below is a VERY LARGE (43MB) pdf of the entire 2007 Painted Woods catalog produced by Valley House Gallery. Downloading will take a while.2007VHCatalogueFull
2007: "More is More: Maximalist Painting"
I worked with art historian Tatiana Flores to help curate a show at the FSU Museum of Fine arts called "More is More: Maximalist Tendencies in Contemporary American Painting". Professor Flores wrote a curatorial essay titled The "Ism" in Maximalism for the beautiful catalog that the museum published for the show. At the time, the word "maximalist" was a made-up adjective we were using to describe paintings that seemed perceptually and conceptually muti-demensional and intense.We enjoyed seeing the word "maximalist" and "Maximalism" starting to be used about a year later by the New York Times and New Yorker writers but must admit, I wish they could have seen this show because if they had, I know they would have wanted to write about how great it was. One of the artist who came to the opening, Jin Meyerson, mentioned he thought this was by far the best painting show he had seen all year...and he lives in NYC!You can see images of the show by going to my website and searching under Gallery Views.The artists in the show were JAMES BARSNESS, DOUGLAS BOURGEOIS, ROB CLAYTON & the Clayton Brothers, MICHAEL ROQUE COLLINS, ROSSON CROW, REED DANZIGER, DANIEL DOVE, LILIAN GARCIA-ROIG, JULIE HEFFERNAN, MARK MESSERSMITH, JIN MEYERSON, GRANT MILLER, LOREN MUNK, ERIK PARKER, EMILIO PEREZ, LISA SANDITZ, DAN SUTHERLAND, GAEL STACK, MASAMI TERAOKA, NICOLA VERLATO, and ROBERT WILLIAMS...with a special appearnace of a 1966 Peter Saul painting...WOW!
Below is my brief co-curatorial statement on this concept behind this show titled "How to Do More with More: Embracing Maximalism in Contemporary Painting". You can click on it to enlarge it so you can actually read it.
Full "More is More..." catalog pdf (3.6 MB) 2007MaxCatalogue
2007: Red Clay Survey
Fall Paths (NH), my 60" X 144" triptych (painted during my 2006 MacDowell residency) was awarded First Place at the Huntsville Museum of Art’s biennial Red Clay Survey: 2007 Exhibit of Contemporary Southern Art" by the juror, Margaret Lazzari. It also won the People’s Choice Award (from the general audience votes) and this was the first time in the show’s long history that both awards had been given to the same work.
2006: Joan Mitchell Painting Award
In November of 2006 I got some exciting and amazing news when I found out I had been awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. The Painters and Sculptors Grant Program was established to acknowledge painters and sculptors creating work of exceptional quality through unrestricted career support. This is a highly competitive and prestigious, once in a life-time national award that comes with a $25,000 prize.http://joanmitchellfoundation.org/artist-programs/artist-grants/painter-sculptorsThis is the largest painting only-specific arts award in the nation and to be selected, one must first be nominated by one of the 80 secret nominators (who can only recommends one painter and one sculptor annually for the award). Both the secret nominators and jury panel consist of prominent curators, artists and art educators from across the country. Out of the 160 artists nominated from the entire pool of artist working in the country, only up to 25 are selected for the award. This is truly a significant award to receive and I am very honored to have gotten it.Joan Mitchell awardees include art-world luminaries such as: Frances Barth, Glenn Ligon, Mel Chin, Fred Tomaselli, Shahzia Sikander, Allison Saar, Janie Antoni, Amy Sillman, Polly Apfelbaum, Do-Ho Suk, Shinique Smith, Tim Hawkinson, Kara Walker, Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, Wangenchi Mutu, Nick Cave, Sue Williams, Mickalene Thomas, and Peter Saul to name a few…Excellent company for sure.
JOAN MITCHELL FOUNDATION (2006 Painter's Award Winner) artist page link:http://joanmitchellfoundation.org/artist-programs/artist-grants/painter-sculptors/2006/lillian-garcia-roig
Super excited and honored to be in this amazing group show of Latinx artists-
Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way explores contemporary Latinx artists’ innovations and interventions within established traditions of painting, inviting discussion on a variety of themes and revealing the diversity and expansiveness present within the field. The fifty-eight artists in the exhibition—and those in the Latinx field more broadly—encourage us to interrogate the continued relevance of boundaries, from political borders to disciplinary confines. This exhibition therefore celebrates artists whose expressions are first and foremost personal and subjective, but whose heterogeneous and culturally specific interventions enrich one another and the history of American and contemporary art, two fields from which such artists have been historically excluded. Inspired by former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem “[Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way],” the show celebrates abundance and presents a vision of Latinx art that is, like the diaspora itself, infinitely complex.
