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
2016: Cuban Art in the 20th Century (FSU)
2016 Art New York Pier 94
2016: South Issue 124 in New American Paintings
2016: Thomas Dean Fine Art
A new 10 month "pop-up" gallery in Palm Desert, California opens the end of August.
https://www.thomasdeansfineart.com/artist/lilian-garcia-roig
2016: Flatbed Press at 25
Flatbed Press at 25 By Mark Lesly Smith and Katherine Brimberry- A visual feast for connoisseurs of contemporary printmaking, this lavishly produced volume presents a twenty-five-year retrospective of one of America’s premier artists’ print shops and the prominent and emerging artists who have worked there.I am very honored to be a part of the long traditional of artists working at Flatbed Press in Austin, Texas and to be included in a book that chronicles the press's 25 year history. This amazing small press invites artists from all over Texas to come to their studios to make new works and experiment with the printmaking medium.Published by University of Texas Press, 2016 https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/smith-brimberry-flatbed-press-at-25
Although I was already primarily painting on-site, I valued being invited to go into the various print shops in Austin for some intensive experimentation. Each shop had its own speciality and equipment-Flatbed was known for its huge, Texas-sized press that many of us called the "the landing strip". I made a series of Mono-prints with Flatbed Press in the mid-1990's. In a printshop environment (indoors with no views of a landscape), I was essentially working in inverse: starting from seeing nothing to discovering how my process of arbitrary mark-making could lead me to discover an image emerging out of paint...one where the process and tools of the printmaking process were as evident as the illusionist image (of woods) created through the multiple press runs. BELOW is an example of the work I did while there.
2016: Small Axe
I am very pleased to have my painting Cumulative Nature: Native Oranges & Palms be mentioned and reproduced in an essay titled Contemporary Art of the Hispanophone Caribbean Islands in an Archipelagic Framework co-written by Tatiana Flores and Michelle Stephens. This essay was included in the The Idea of Hispanophone Caribbean Studies section, guest edited by Vanessa Perez-Rosario for the 51st issue of SMALL AXE, a Caribbean journal of criticism published three times a year by Duke University Press.
More information on the publication and on how to order it can be found at: http://smallaxe.net/sx/issues/51
2016: SECAC
On Friday, October 21, I presented a talk for the SECAC session:CINTAS Foundation announce this year’s finalists for the annual CINTAS Knight Foundation Fellowship Competition: Pavel Acosta-Proenza, Aurora de Armendi, Ivan Toth Depeña, Vanessa Diaz, Lilian Garcia-Roig, Diana Guerrero-Macia, Gabriel Martinez, Hugo Patao, Carlos Rigau, Norberto Rodriguez, Juana Valdes.The MDC Museum of Art + Design at the Freedom Tower will be exhibiting the visual arts finalists’ work through December 30, 2016. The exhibition, which features works by each of the visual arts finalists, is free and open to the public. CINTAS Fellowships acknowledge creative accomplishments and encourage excellence in architecture, literature, music composition and the visual arts. Eligibility is limited to artists of Cuban citizenship or direct descent (having a Cuban parent or grandparent).The jury: Amada Cruz, Director, Phoenix Art Museum; Stephen Maine, The School of Visual Arts, New York; Dominic Molon, Curator, RISD Museum; Shannon Stratton, Chief Curator; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Helen Toomer, Director, Pulse Contemporary Art Fair.
2016: Fleeting
2016: Art Miami (Cernuda Arte)
2016: Joan Mitchell Center Artist-in-Residence Program
I am VERY honored and excited to announce that I was selected to be an attendee at the Joan Mitchell Center 2017 Artist-in-Residence Program (MAY)! The Joan Mitchell Center, an artist residency in New Orleans, supports local, national & international contemporary visual artists.
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.
