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.
2022: The Painting Center
Join Gallery114@HCC Ybor City Campus for the opening reception of Hyphenated Nature on Thursday, February 17, 2022 from 5:00–8:00 p.m.
Who we are and where we are from—two seemingly simple inquiries—are complex territories for negotiation that shape the core of our personal identity. Florida-based artist Lilian Garcia-Roig (b. 1966, Cuba) uses landscape painting as a vehicle for examining notions like sense of place, belonging, and identity in both perceptually-based plein-air paintings and conceptually-based studio works. In Hyphenated Nature at Gallery114@HCC, Garcia-Roig displays her two approaches to landscape painting side-by-side, reconciling on-site works that capture dense, expressive vegetation with paintings made in her studio using Cuban soil. Seen through the lens of Garcia-Roig’s Cuban-American experience, these distinct bodies of work call to mind the intricate nature of one’s own attachment to time, place, and the lands we inhabit.
A talk by artist Lilian Garcia-Roig will begin at 6:00 p.m. in the Mainstage Theater, YPAB.
Lilian Garcia-Roig- "Homage to Vinales" & Perri Neri- "Shifting Ground"
2022: Moss Arts Center (Virginia Tech)
Join Gallery114@HCC Ybor City Campus for the opening reception of Hyphenated Nature on Thursday, February 17, 2022 from 5:00–8:00 p.m.
Who we are and where we are from—two seemingly simple inquiries—are complex territories for negotiation that shape the core of our personal identity. Florida-based artist Lilian Garcia-Roig (b. 1966, Cuba) uses landscape painting as a vehicle for examining notions like sense of place, belonging, and identity in both perceptually-based plein-air paintings and conceptually-based studio works. In Hyphenated Nature at Gallery114@HCC, Garcia-Roig displays her two approaches to landscape painting side-by-side, reconciling on-site works that capture dense, expressive vegetation with paintings made in her studio using Cuban soil. Seen through the lens of Garcia-Roig’s Cuban-American experience, these distinct bodies of work call to mind the intricate nature of one’s own attachment to time, place, and the lands we inhabit.
A talk by artist Lilian Garcia-Roig will begin at 6:00 p.m. in the Mainstage Theater, YPAB.
https://artscenter.vt.edu/exhibitions/garcia-roig.html
2022: Panel Discussion at FIU
Join Gallery114@HCC Ybor City Campus for the opening reception of Hyphenated Nature on Thursday, February 17, 2022 from 5:00–8:00 p.m.
Who we are and where we are from—two seemingly simple inquiries—are complex territories for negotiation that shape the core of our personal identity. Florida-based artist Lilian Garcia-Roig (b. 1966, Cuba) uses landscape painting as a vehicle for examining notions like sense of place, belonging, and identity in both perceptually-based plein-air paintings and conceptually-based studio works. In Hyphenated Nature at Gallery114@HCC, Garcia-Roig displays her two approaches to landscape painting side-by-side, reconciling on-site works that capture dense, expressive vegetation with paintings made in her studio using Cuban soil. Seen through the lens of Garcia-Roig’s Cuban-American experience, these distinct bodies of work call to mind the intricate nature of one’s own attachment to time, place, and the lands we inhabit.
A talk by artist Lilian Garcia-Roig will begin at 6:00 p.m. in the Mainstage Theater, YPAB.
In the Mind's Eye runs until January 8, 2023.
Catalog (Below) with essay by Amy Galpin, Chief Curator of the Patricia and Philip Frost Art Museum is available for purchase from the FIU Museum store in hard & soft cover.
ISBN 978-1-7375994-1-8
To learn more about Juan Tomas Roig, touch the link on his name.
2022: Florida International University
Join Gallery114@HCC Ybor City Campus for the opening reception of Hyphenated Nature on Thursday, February 17, 2022 from 5:00–8:00 p.m.
Who we are and where we are from—two seemingly simple inquiries—are complex territories for negotiation that shape the core of our personal identity. Florida-based artist Lilian Garcia-Roig (b. 1966, Cuba) uses landscape painting as a vehicle for examining notions like sense of place, belonging, and identity in both perceptually-based plein-air paintings and conceptually-based studio works. In Hyphenated Nature at Gallery114@HCC, Garcia-Roig displays her two approaches to landscape painting side-by-side, reconciling on-site works that capture dense, expressive vegetation with paintings made in her studio using Cuban soil. Seen through the lens of Garcia-Roig’s Cuban-American experience, these distinct bodies of work call to mind the intricate nature of one’s own attachment to time, place, and the lands we inhabit.
A talk by artist Lilian Garcia-Roig will begin at 6:00 p.m. in the Mainstage Theater, YPAB.
Curated by Amy Galpin
2021: The Feminist Art Project at TFAP
So pleased to get to meet and be in conversation with Phyllis Hollis. She has an impressive line-up of artists and art world professionals that I have long admired so very honored to be counted among one of her interviewees-
The Cerebral Women Art Talks podcast is an extension of @cerebral_women. Conversations offer insights into the visual art world from artists, mainly artists of color, and female artists who freely articulate what inspires their creativity. In addition, you'll hear interesting perspectives from dedicated art professionals who work with artists and the art institutions that feature them. Art Advisors, Art Critics, Collectors, Curators, Gallerists, Museum Professionals.
2021: The Grace Museum
So pleased to get to meet and be in conversation with Phyllis Hollis. She has an impressive line-up of artists and art world professionals that I have long admired so very honored to be counted among one of her interviewees-
The Cerebral Women Art Talks podcast is an extension of @cerebral_women. Conversations offer insights into the visual art world from artists, mainly artists of color, and female artists who freely articulate what inspires their creativity. In addition, you'll hear interesting perspectives from dedicated art professionals who work with artists and the art institutions that feature them. Art Advisors, Art Critics, Collectors, Curators, Gallerists, Museum Professionals.
The fact that the first work of art purchased by the Abilene Fine Arts Museum in 1939 was painted by a woman artist and the fact that the museum was founded through the efforts of local woman’s club members, many of whom were artists, foretell the museum’s long history of exhibiting and collecting artwork by women artists. Paintings, fine art prints, and photographs in this exhibition featuring over 100 outstanding works of art from The Grace Museum permanent collection is a testament to the important contributions made by women artists in the 20th and 21st century.
Artwork by Lee Krasner, Alice Neel, Marion Post Wolcott, Hung Liu, Peggy Bacon, Garciella Iturbide, Melissa Miller, Beili Liu, Helen Altman, Lillian Garcia-Roig, Toni LaSelle, and Mary Ellen Mark is presented “frame to frame” with exceptional artwork by other women artists of the past and present in solidarity of purpose and achievement in the visual arts.
https://www.thegracemuseum.org/exhibitions-list/2020/9/20/sherry-owens-outgrowth-jf6rd-jldzg
2021: Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love
So pleased to get to meet and be in conversation with Phyllis Hollis. She has an impressive line-up of artists and art world professionals that I have long admired so very honored to be counted among one of her interviewees-
The Cerebral Women Art Talks podcast is an extension of @cerebral_women. Conversations offer insights into the visual art world from artists, mainly artists of color, and female artists who freely articulate what inspires their creativity. In addition, you'll hear interesting perspectives from dedicated art professionals who work with artists and the art institutions that feature them. Art Advisors, Art Critics, Collectors, Curators, Gallerists, Museum Professionals.
2021: Blackwell Prize in Painting
So pleased to get to meet and be in conversation with Phyllis Hollis. She has an impressive line-up of artists and art world professionals that I have long admired so very honored to be counted among one of her interviewees-
The Cerebral Women Art Talks podcast is an extension of @cerebral_women. Conversations offer insights into the visual art world from artists, mainly artists of color, and female artists who freely articulate what inspires their creativity. In addition, you'll hear interesting perspectives from dedicated art professionals who work with artists and the art institutions that feature them. Art Advisors, Art Critics, Collectors, Curators, Gallerists, Museum Professionals.
2021: Huntsville Museum of Art
So pleased to get to meet and be in conversation with Phyllis Hollis. She has an impressive line-up of artists and art world professionals that I have long admired so very honored to be counted among one of her interviewees-
The Cerebral Women Art Talks podcast is an extension of @cerebral_women. Conversations offer insights into the visual art world from artists, mainly artists of color, and female artists who freely articulate what inspires their creativity. In addition, you'll hear interesting perspectives from dedicated art professionals who work with artists and the art institutions that feature them. Art Advisors, Art Critics, Collectors, Curators, Gallerists, Museum Professionals.
Cumulative Nature: Painted Paint Rock
, 4'x 6' diptych, 2008
2021: Art Talks Podcast
So pleased to get to meet and be in conversation with Phyllis Hollis. She has an impressive line-up of artists and art world professionals that I have long admired so very honored to be counted among one of her interviewees-
The Cerebral Women Art Talks podcast is an extension of @cerebral_women. Conversations offer insights into the visual art world from artists, mainly artists of color, and female artists who freely articulate what inspires their creativity. In addition, you'll hear interesting perspectives from dedicated art professionals who work with artists and the art institutions that feature them. Art Advisors, Art Critics, Collectors, Curators, Gallerists, Museum Professionals.
So pleased to get to meet and be in conversation with Phyllis Hollis. She has an impressive line-up of artists and art world professionals that I have long admired so very honored to be counted among one of her interviewees-
The Cerebral Women Art Talks podcast is an extension of @cerebral_women. Conversations offer insights into the visual art world from artists, mainly artists of color, and female artists who freely articulate what inspires their creativity. In addition, you'll hear interesting perspectives from dedicated art professionals who work with artists and the art institutions that feature them. Art Advisors, Art Critics, Collectors, Curators, Gallerists, Museum Professionals.
2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts
Thankful to the Guggenheim Foundation selection committee for their belief in and support of my work and honored to have been selected as a 2021 Fellow. I am particularly honored to be among such an outstanding group of artists, many of whom I have admired for a long time.
Thankful to the Guggenheim Foundation selection committee for their belief in and support of my work and honored to have been selected as a 2021 Fellow. I am particularly honored to be among such an outstanding group of artists, many of whom I have admired for a long time.
https://www.gf.org/about/fellowship/
https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/lilian-garcia-roig/
2020: Valley House Gallery
Easley Magazine
2019
Overton
2018
2020: Florida Contemporary
THE FLORIDA CONTEMPORARY REOPENED & EXTENDED THROUGH JULY 2021-
https://artisnaples.org/baker-museum/exhibitions/2020-21/florida-contemporary
-Painting on-site summer of 2019 - looking at the clear, rushing melted ice water of the Skykomish River located in the foothills of the Cascades Mountains in NW Washington State-
2020: B20 (Wiregrass Biennial)
https://wiregrassbiennial.com/works/cumulative-nature-north-florida-palm-brush/
B:20 interview link: https://www.wiregrassmuseum.org/b20-artist-interview-with-lilian-garcia-roig-3/
Thank you to all who voted for my work "Cumulative Nature: Northern Florida Palm Brush" (48" x 72"), 2020 - It was wonderful to receive the People's Choice Award!
https://www.wiregrassmuseum.org/wma-announces-prize-winners-for-b20-wiregrass-biennial/
http://wiregrassbiennial.com
2020: Remake/Remodel
REMAKE/REMODEL
Curated by Amelia Biewald & Jason Clay.
The seemingly endless storm of recent events has me thinking of ways artists interpret and process their surroundings. The creation of art reflects the artist’s response to their world, and that can be both beautiful and ugly. I have been revisiting the often politically charged and highly critical works of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, and their impactful and sometimes disturbing reflections — on racial discrimination, war, woman’s rights, religion, the environment and moral hypocrisy. Their large-scale installations or tableaux are assemblages of fragments of cultural objects and detritus with found images, advertisements, photographs, text, furniture, interiors, plaster casts, and animals. These objects hint at multiple layers of life experience and our surrounding society. These adulterated and repurposed materials spoke directly to the inhumanity and social injustices of 20th century society.
Fast forward to the inhumanity of the 21st century: little has changed, and it needs to. The Royal is seeking artists who strive to REMAKE / REMODEL in these chaotic times. While documenting this current turmoil is important, we’d like to also think of what comes after. How do you reinvent or alter imagery or objects in your work? How does your process of making uncover further narrative or meaning? How do you reflect on your world? Through art and creativity perhaps we can look for a common ground and come together to reinvent a better future.
Featured artists: Nicole Awai, Julie Blume, Michael Pribich, Esperanza Cortez, Kris Rac, Cecile Chong, Grace Graupe-Pillard, Yuliya Lanin, Lilian Garcia-Roig, Julien Tomasello, Tessa Krieg, Elena Chestnykh, & Benjamin Cabral.
2020: Art Museum of South Texas (From Then to Now She Says)
https://www.artmuseumofsouthtexas.org/exhibitions/from-then-to-now-she-says-selections-from-the-permanent-collection/
2020: Arts Districts (Quarantine Diaries)
http://artdistricts.com/quarantine-diaries-lilian-garcia-roig/
As an on-site painter, place is integral to both my subject and process, so when the COVID-19 crisis made traveling difficult, it became clear that I had to shift from working in the field to in the studio and virtual realms. This gave me the opportunity/excuse to fully focus on a research-based project first started during a 2017 working trip to Cuba. It centers on discovering links between my work as a painter and the scientific work of my great uncle, the renown Cuban botanist Juan Tomás Roig.
A deep dive into on-line herbarium archives resulted in finding an immense trove of botanical specimens that were named after Roig and/or collected by him. I found it curious that many of the endemic Cuban plants he collected had also migrated across the world; ultimately residing institutions such as the Smithsonian and Harvard.
These things – the closest I have to family heirlooms - are in museums I can only access digitally. As a Cuban born American citizen, I now find myself relating my own complex identity to these specimens. They illustrate the connections I have made to my environment, the history I lost when we fled Cuba, and the ever-shifting power dynamics that colonialism and migration create.
This work-in-progress “Recollecting Roig” series is a reclamation gesture made by a Cuban-born, American-raised landscape painter yearning to capture and connect to her truncated personal, cultural and artistic heritage. Tallahassee, FL, Summer 2020.
See the full Issue #63 of Arts District Magazine: FLORIDA https://indd.adobe.com/view/3a8c4022-5a86-4457-b788-4f55b3c0af7b
2020: Florida Biennial
Show opens November 6, 2020 & runs through February 21, 2021
https://www.artandculturecenter.org/florida-biennial-20
Hyphenated Nature: Northern Florida-Cuban Painting Relations (After Carta) 2020
Oil on canvas (for the on-site paintings on the left & right sides) and acrylic and hand-made Cuban-dirt pigment on canvas (middle square) 30" x 78"
2020: Latinx Art (book feature)
In Latinx Art (published by Duke Press) Arlene Dávila draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to explore the problem of visualizing Latinx art and artists. Providing an inside and critical look of the global contemporary art market, Dávila's book is at once an introduction to contemporary Latinx art and a call to decolonize the art worlds and practices that erase and whitewash Latinx artists. Dávila shows the importance of race, class, and nationalism in shaping contemporary art markets while providing a path for scrutinizing art and culture institutions and for diversifying the art world-
SO EXCITED THAT I AM MENTIONED IN THIS BOOK AND INCLUDED IN THE "NON COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF ARTISTS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW" in Appendix A-in such excellent company!
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.
