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
2011: Hambidge Residency
In October I had a short two-week residency at the Hambidge Center for the Arts in Georgia and was a featured artist during their annual open house and major fall festival arts event. While there, I discovered a new color of leaves to add to my fall palette that year (salmon pink) thanks to the turning of the sourwood trees. Hambidge is nestled in the foot hills of the Blue Ridge and Mountains (10 miles south west of the NC border) and is on about 600 acres of beautiful wooded rolling hills complete with an impressive waterfall and meandering streams. They have about a dozen cabins , each designed to house either writers, composers, choreographers, musicians or visual artists. It was a great, but too short, experience and I look forward to returning.
2011: Art Museum of South Texas
Revelations: Women's Art from the Permanent Collection of the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi. My painting Layered Views (below) was used on the museum's invitation and press releases for this show.
2011: SCOPE NYC
My Miami dealer, Carol Jazzar, wanted to present my works as a solo show booth at the SCOPE art fair in NYC and I was VERY excited to oblige. I created a wrap-around, three walled installation of all of the larger fall-themed paintings I had so as to totally overwhelm the viewer with color, paint, oozed-out paint marks as they literally walked into my "Cumulative Nature" paintings. It was great hearing all the praise the audience (of all ages and backgrounds) was giving my works. People would come back multiple times to the booth and often bring a new person with them. It was so popular that it ended up Stephen Truax of Hyperallergic.com mentioned it as a highlight of the fair as did Art Slant's Natalie Hegert and other blog sites!!! Below are small pdf links to some.Hyper2011ScopeFairArtSlantDiversionsAndDistractionsScopeScopeNYCThingsISee
2011: Polk Museum
I was invited to have a solo show at the Polk Museum in Lakeland, FL and they offered to make a small catalog for the show titled "En Plein" Sight . It was for this catalog that the essay "Catching Up with the Instant", by Richard Shiff, was created and first published. Since my work is site-specific, I always like to try to able able to make at least one painting of the region I am exhibiting in. I mentioned this to the curator and he he made special arrangements for me to be able to paint at the Nature Conservancy's Disney Wilderness Preserve in Kissimmee, FL (central Florida) which turns out too be close to the museum.
Below is a small downloadable pdf of the exhibition catalog "En Plein" Sight that was published by the Polk Museum.PolkGarciaRoigCatalogRevision
OnViewLGR2011On View Magazine did a nice Profile on me in their 2011 Aug/Sept Issue (pages 116-117). Above is a link to a small pdf version of the article.
2011: An Essay by Richard Shiff
Richard Shiff and I were colleagues when I was teaching at The University of Texas at Austin. I admire how he writes in a way that satiates the art historians’ and theorists’ intellectual needs while engaging lay people and stimulating artists. After hearing Richard speak, I always felt like running to my studio and painting. He liked my work over the years, so I contacted him when I heard he would be visiting Florida State University (where I am a Professor of painting) as the 2010 Distinguished Speaker for the Art History Department’s annual symposium. He visited the studio and saw some of my new paintings. Since the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, Florida, was publishing a catalog for my upcoming exhibition, I asked him if he would consider writing about my work. He was particularly taken by my new water painting and asked if he could focus on those... as a result, he contributed the essay, Catching Up With The Instant, for which I am most grateful. A pdf of it can be downloaded below.ShiffEssay
2010: Caught in the Act of Looking
I was invited to be a visiting artist and have a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery at Broward College in March of 2010. I was able to show extensive works from WA as well as some from NH & FL.
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.
