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
2013: Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 21
I was included in Volume 21 of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Art & Architecture) in the chapter titled "Paintings and Painters, 1980-2012" (on page 143), published by the University of North Carolina Press and sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. I was surprised and honored to be included in such an important and respected reference book on this subject....I must be a true Southerner now!This book can be purchased through the UNC press at www.uncpress.unc.edu or through Amoazon.com. Below is a small pdf of the section I am in.2013The-New-Encyclopedia-of-Southern-Culture
2013: Sight-Specific
The MAC believes that there is a rich art tradition in Texas that deserves to be nurtured and encouraged. Nearly twenty years of programming that consistently exhibits both native Texas artists and artists who are transplanted to Texas reflects this mission and desire to understand the region where we choose to live. This fall, The MAC is pleased to feature Southern Methodist Universities’ Meadows School of the Arts graduate and thirty year Texas resident, Lilian Garcia-Roig. Her exhibition, Sight-Specific continues The MAC’s tradition of exhibiting artists that developed their talent in Texas.Sight-Specific is a selection of recent large-scale works and groupings that depict the dense forest landscapes from Northern Florida and Georgia as well as the Cascades Mountains in Washington State. Many works in the exhibition are from two on-going series: Cumulative Nature and Hyperbolic Nature. Garcia-Roig paints outdoors, a method art historically known as en plein air, a French expression for “in the open air”. However, unlike the 19th Century Impressionist painters who sought to capture a single moment, Garcia-Roig paints over the course of an entire day placing an important emphasis on the performative aspects of on-site painting. The changing of light and passing of time is imperative to documenting a first hand and extended experience of nature. Both series in Sight-Specific represent the first groups of large-scale paintings produced in this manner (rather than over multiple half-day sessions as she had done before) continuing to increase the productive tension Garcia-Roig seeks between the materiality of paint and the optics of representation.Garcia-Roig considers her current reinvestigations of the traditional plein air methodology as an act of defiance in a virtualized world that often lacks unmediated or meaningful experiences with nature. In Garcia-Roig’s paintings there is an immediate sense of the temporal and sublime, that nature is intoxicatingly near and yet unreachable.MACpressRelease2013You can see more exhibition views on my web page under "Gallery Views" which is the last row under my "Paintings Series" tab. Below is a very small pdf titled "Hidden Gems III" that gives additional history and information about the McKinney Avenue Contemporary (the MAC) in Dallas:2013HiddenGemTheMcKinneyAvenueContemporary| Russell Tether Fine Art
2013: Meadows Museum & Sorolla
I was honored to be invited by the Meadows Museum on the SMU campus in Dallas, TX to give an Afternoon Gallery Talk in conjunction with their amazing show "Sorolla and America" which ran from Dec 13, 2013-April 19, 2014. http://www.meadowsmuseumdallas.org/about_Sorolla.htm My talk was titled: "Past and Present: Sorolla and the Tradition of Plein-Air Painting" and was on Friday, February 28, at 12:15 pm. I was told by Carmen Smith (the Director of Education at the Meadows Museum) that it was the most highly attended gallery talk they had ever had .....it was standing room only as almost two hundred people filled the galleries. It was great time for me as I got to see and talk about works I had admired for along time while also being able to have a wonderful Q &A with the audience and it was especially thrilling to have one of my paintings shown alongside his works. I think if you have any interest in perceptually-based painting, then Joaquin Sorolla is a "must-see"...Luckily his masterwork titled "Visions of Spain" has recently been cleaned an rehung in its own renovated gallery in the Hispanic Society of America in NYC. http://www.hispanicsociety.org
2013: Conspicuous Nature
Conspicuous Nature was a solo show at the Turner Center for the Arts in Valdoasta GA. This large gallery space allowed me to present larger-scale works from four of the main regions I work: FL, GA, WA & NH. For this Nov. 2013 - Jan 2014 show, I made sure to include some of the fall-themed Hambidge works (like the one above) to remind the audience of just how amazing parts of their state are.
2013: Saturation Points
Saturation Pointswas my eighth solo show at Valley House Gallery in Dallas and the theme of that show was just it you thought it would be....some of my most intensely colored, all-day cumulative paintings from various fall periods, created mostly during my Hambidge residency and from my MacDowell Colony residency in NH (that I was finally willing to part with).Below are small pdfs links of two local reviews:CultureMapSaturationPointsDallasMorningNewsReview
2013: Fairs, Fairs & More Art Fairs
Valley House Gallery did not want to miss the Texas art fair action so they exhibited at The Dallas Art Fair, Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas (CADD) Fair and the Houston Art fair where I was one of their featured artists.
2013: Art Wynwood
People in South Florida were getting more chances to see my work and they seemed to like what they saw.
2013: Cernuda Arte
In 2013 Cernuda Arte, a gallery in Coral Gables that specializes in Cuban art, began representing my work and they have featured my paintings in various group shows and art fairs such as the LA Art Show, Art Chicago, Dallas Art Fair, Houston Art Fair, Art Wynwood and Art Miami. I am scheduled to have a solo show titled "In the Thick of It: Lilian Garcia-Roig-A Decade of Painting in Florida" in February 2015 and that show will have an accompanying catalog and essay by Carol Damian , Director & Curator of the Frost Museum in Miami.
More information on the gallery can be found on the small pdf below and on their website: cernudaarte.comCernuda Arte copy 2
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.
