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
2014 Art Miami
Cernuda Arte exhibited a large collection of Wilfredo Lam works as well as a group show that includes my paintings at Art Miami in Booth C-30ART MIAMI DATES AND HOURS:VIP PREVIEW - By InvitationDecember 2, 5:30 PM - 10:00 PMGENERAL SHOW HOURS:December 3 thru 6, 11:00 AM - 8:00 PMDecember 7, 11:00 AM - 6:00 PM
2014: Portable MacDowell
The MacDowell Colony just launched a new site that tracks what part of the country various MacDowell Fellows are exhibiting, performing or participating in other events that bare about their creative works. You can go directly to my page at the link below:http://portablemacdowell.org/#artists/lilian-garcia-roig
2014: Martin Museum of Art
The Martin Museum of Art (on the campus of Baylor University) in Waco will be hosting two concurrent solo shows: James Surls and me! Surls will have his large sculptures and drawings in Gallery 1 and I will have many of my large, on-site multi-panel paintings (from FL, GA, WA & NH) in Gallery 2 in a show I titled TIME SENSITIVE.Surls is a quintessential Texas artist who makes bold works and I am particularly excited about this show and the juxtaposition of our works because I have been a huge fan of both his monumental sculptures and drawings since I first saw them back when I was in high school. While our works are very different on the surface, I have always felt a strong connection to his work, his aesthetics, his process and the materiality of his pieces...I am a maximalist 2-D, colorful version of him, or something like that...I hope.
Below are two small png (like pdf) links to download more information about the artists in the show:Surls-Roiginside surls-roig-outsideBaylorKWTX.pnghttps://baylorlariat.com/2014/10/22/photos-art-exhibits/
2014: A Mysterious Clarity: 2.0
This was the decade anniversary of our inaugural exhibit at 621 Gallery in Tallahassee in 2004!...we are getting better with age-or at least our paintings are:)
2014: A Transfer of Spirit
There is a nice exhibition catalog with an essay by Roger Winter that was produced for the show A Transfer of Spirit at Kirk Hopper in Dallas . It is available for purchase through Kirk Hopper's webpage http://www.kirkhopperfineart.com
2014: A Way of Remembering
A Way of Remembering March 4 - 29, 2014 Twelve female abstract painters whose art demonstrates a loose, active brush, curated by Elaine Taylor. ARTIST: Suzan Cook, Lilian Garcia-Roig, Cynthia Hammett, Mary Clay Hernandez, Julie Lazarus, Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Teri Muse, Harmony Padgett, Winter Rusiloski, Charlotte Seifert, Jennifer Stufflebeam and Mary Vernon."These paintings by twelve artists are loosely based on the landscape. The artists explore and explode the structure of land and architecture, the order of the universe, the poetry of place. They convey snippets of time and the intersections of life in their rawest forms of color, line and shape. Each artist works in an abstracted method of painting; taking the original source image and breaking it down into gestural brush strokes, broad swaths of color, drips, edges and lines. A new visual space is created in which the experience of the artist is recorded in energetic marks that speak of passion, and of the moment, frozen and then thawed. The resulting images both evoke the landscape and belie it, taking the viewer into an inner landscape of thought and memory." --Elaine Taylor VALLEY HOUSE GALLERY opened its 60th Anniversary exhibition on SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4. Congratulations to the Vogels on their amazing accomplishment. So proud that I have been showing with them since 1992! Below is an image of the work they included in their catalog for the show that can be ordered by contacting the gallery at gallery@valleyhouse.com.
2014: LATIN AMERICA
LATIN AMERICA NEW YORK AUCTION MAY, 2013I was excited about having one of my Florida on-site paintings being included (and sold) in the Phillips Auction House Gallery’s show Latin Americain NYC."Phillips is the destination for international collectors to buy and sell the world’s most important contemporary works of art. By focusing specifically on the defining aesthetic movements of the last century, we’ve set ourselves apart as the most dynamic and forward-thinking auction house". It has the most active, contemporary focused Latin American Art Department of the auction houses so it is a great honor to have work included in this curated show and catalog since it is one of the most far reaching and respected of its kind and it contextualized my work with major international Latin American artists. Having my painting hung next to important Cuban artists such as Rene Francisco (middle), Kcho (far right-image below) and Carlos Garacioa (bottom photo, bottom right) and seeing how well it fit with their work –how at home it looked- made me realize that my Cuban identity, while rather assimilated into American culture, was intact & important and that my work does has a place within the continuum of Cuban Art.Phillips produces large, beautiful full catalogs of all of the selected featured works in their various auction exhibitions and those catalogs are used by art collectors and curators as reference books on that show's subject . You can purchase a catalog at:https://www.phillips.com/catalogues/buy
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.
