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
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
2006: MacDowell Colony Residency
Founded in 1896 by the composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, the pianist Marian MacDowell, the MacDowell Colony is one of the oldest and most distinguished and prestigious artists residency programs in the nation. It is nested in 450 acres of wooded lands on the outskirts of Peterborough New Hampshire. The mission of The MacDowell Colony is to nurture the arts by offering creative individuals of the highest talent an inspiring environment in which they can produce enduring works of the imagination. The sole criterion for acceptance to The MacDowell Colony is artistic excellence. Fellows in the fields of Architecture, Composition, Film, Interdisciplinary Artists, Theatre Artists, Visual Artists and Writers are chosen by a selection committee comprised of leaders in their respective fields from a very large pool of international applications.I had been wanting to return to the North East during the fall season since my visit to Vermont in September of 1996 when I was a Visiting Artist Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center so I was thrilled to be able to get a fall residency at MacDowell from Mid-Sept to Mid-Oct. The grounds of the colony are covered with maple, birch, and beech trees and they were in full glory during my visit. The display of high intensity yellows, oranges, reds and the full range of greens allowed me to explore and use pigments and colors in my on-site works like never before. I had stocked up on my cadmiums before I went but had to buy more while I was there!My time there was beyond great and I was able to create 20 mostly mid-sized works that were true intense perceptual experiences. I was humbled and honored to find out that I was selected as a Milton and Sally Avery Fellow. This is an annual honor given to two MacDowell residents of “outstanding ability in the area of painting”.http://www.macdowellcolony.org
2006: Thick Brush Painting Installation
This was my first large-scale painting installation and it consisted of 19 independently created on-site paintings arranged in a non-contiguous way, closely to one another so that formal relationships from one painting flowed into the next. I like to show my individually conceived paintings as large installations of closely hung, formally connected works that create a sense of compelling overwhelmingness in the viewer....an experience that more closely parallels that of actually being in the woods; constantly focusing in and out of space over time. The dense grouping caused the viewer to not be able to see each work as an individual painting (or image/view) thus purposely undermining some of the representational solidity of the works and bringing their formal qualities (the abstract nature of painting with the materiality of the paint and the painting process) to the forefront of this perceptual experience.
All of the paintings in this show were created over my three summers of working on-site in the foothills Cascades Mountains of Washington State. Below is a pdf of a full artist's statement about the works in this show.2006MACartistSt
2006: More Mysterious Clarity(s)
Two new versions of A Mysterious Clarity were exhibited in 2006. One was Gaddis Geeslin Gallery at San Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas and the other was at the Wynwood Art Complex during the Miami Beach Art Basel week.
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.
