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
2010: Summer Research-Water
In 2010 I returned to Washington state to paint. This time, however, instead of focusing the woods I wanted to paint the water because I had been so surprisingly intrigued by my first attempts at it the summer before. I had been trying to capture the changing light over the course of the day on dense woods (and trying to do so on a large scale) for a while and had actually been avoiding painting water...at least in Florida where the water is often stagnate & opaque and therefore, functions too much like a resting point in my paintings which is something I do not want in my highly active "over-all" compositions. In Washington state, however, there are clear, moving waters that have rapids, rocks and logs in them so it turned out these waters were even more complicated and had even more moving & changing color/parts than the woods. This meant I had to try to capture not just the surface of the water, but also the movement of that surface. On top of that, I had to capture the changing reflections of the sky and clouds as well as what I could see below the surface of the water as it ebbed and flowed down stream.
Talk about the complex nature of trying to capture first-hand the multidimensional and ever-changing experience of being in a specific location...painting water was it! I was mesmerized and hooked...I rented a cabin with a small, make-shift shed-studio were I was able to spend almost a month painting by the banks of the Skykomish River.
2010: Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, FL
This exhibition Hyperbolic Nature: Recent Paintings by Lilian Garcia-Roig took place in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville and the works were exhibited in two different parts of the museum, over two different floors. Above yo see views of the Atrium Gallery which is the first exhibition space one sees when you enter the museum. Normally a large Joan Mitchell painting hangs there so I was surprised and honored to be asked to hang this installation of my large-scale MacDowell paintings for the duration of my show. Below are views of the second floor galleries. 
Above is a photo of me standing next to Debra Murphy, Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at University of North Florida. She wrote the essay in the catalog that is available to download as a large (25MB) pdf. 2010MOCAbrochure
2010: CAA in Chicago
Coalition of Women in the Arts Organization Regional Women Artists: Exploring Nature, Spirituality, and Universal Order Thursday, February 11, 5:30 PM–7:00 PM Acapulco, Gold Level, West Tower, Hyatt Regency Chicago Chair: Kyra Belan, Broward College; Mother Earth, Thought Woman: Mixed-Media Installation Kyra Belan, Broward College A New Urgency and Relevance in Postmodern Plein-Air Painting Lilian Garcia-Roig, Florida State University; Women, Nature, and New Technology Jeane Cooper, Florida Atlantic University; Tribute and Remembrance: Vanitas and the Holocaust in the Works of Helene Baker Debra Murphy, University of North Florida.
2010: New American Paintings # 88
was included in New American Paintings #88 (Southern edition) juried by Barbara O’Brien, curator, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City MO. In her juror’s comments (p 3.), she was impressed by my monumental use of scale and called my works, “tour de force reinvestigations of the plein-air painting tradition”…Wow.
2010: More than a Brush With Nature
More than a Brush With Nature: Plein-Air Paintings by Lilian Garcia-Roig was a solo exhibition at University of North Florida's Art Gallery in Jacksonville, FL. I was also a visiting artist there and gave a gallery talk. This show opened concurrently with a larger show I was having at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville so I basically was showing everything I had left in my studio in the city of Jacksonville for the months of November & December! Debra Murphy, Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at UNF, curated this show and she wrote an article about this show for the Oct/Nov issue of Arbus (North Florida's Arts & Business Magazine) magazine (pages 58-62), She also wrote a curatorial essay for the catalog for the MOCA.
2010: Turk Work
Tulips originated in Turkey, not Holland, and the tulip is the symbol of Istanbul, second only to carnations in the number of places it is represented. When I returned from Istanbul, I knew that the works I wanted to create for my show at Artane the following summer were going to be based on those amazing tulip and carnation designs seen painted in such seductively styled ways on ceramics and fiercely abstracted in carpet designs. I also knew that my new works would be hybrid in nature: that they would be on paper and would use various printmaking techniques (screen printing, stencils, stamps) that allowed for me to make repeatable elements (both with complex geometric mathematically-based designs and flower abstractions derived from Turkish carpet motifs) ; and that they would use painting (water-based acrylics, guaches), water colors and inks) and even drawing here and there for good measure. I had already bought a dozen old wooden fabric dye-stamps in the Grand Bazaar and had taken lots of photos of as many tiles and carpets that had tulip, carnation and general garden motifs I could find so I came back to the studio running. Within a month, I had created and carved over 50 stamps out, made 12 screens and numerous stencils so I went to town "painting" with my printing tools. I wanted to combine the rigid elements of the geometric designs with the more fluid elements of the flower motifs, in part, because I see Istanbul as a place were literally the West meets the East in a type of odd harmony. Below you can see examples of some of my stamps that I was testing and grouping. You can also see that a type of visual entropy quickly moved into my aesthetics as I quickly moved from a more harmonic sacred geometric feel in the work to an asymmetrical free-form of dense clustering of forms. UNFORTUNATELY, as I was in the middle of working on this new and exciting project, I found out that the gallery was going to close that year so that meant my exhibition would happen. I put all of these works in-progress on hold and never showed any of them.....waiting for the right time to get back to them.
2010: Istanbul in the Summer
Opened in 2005 by Sevil Sert, ARTANE Gallery is a unique gallery in the centre of Istanbul acts as a bridge between Turkey and the International art world by enabling a platform in which artists of many nationalities can create and show new projects. Ms. Sert lived in Cuba for several years and has a deep interest in contemporary Cuban art and artists, living both in and outside of Cuba and specializes in showing their work so it was not a total surprise that when she saw my work at Carol Jazzar's booth at the BRIDGE fair during the Miami Beach Art Basel in 2008 and liked it...so she asked me if I would be interested in visiting Istanbul and making some new work to show at her gallery there...guess what I said:)
During my 10 day visit, I did mange to go to all the major historical sites and museums but I was particularly taken by the bazaars....the Grand Bazaar and Spice Bazaar that I show images of below.
2010: INFLUENCES-Turkish Rugs
GARDEN and GEOMETRIC FLORAL are my two most favorite Persian rug motifs.
I have been a life-long fan of Persian Miniature paintings.
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.
