Artist Bio
Lilian Garcia-Roig is a Cuba born, Texas raised artist living/teaching in Tallahassee, Florida but now splitting time in her studio in Kerhonkson, New York. As an immigrant/Latinx artist, Garcia-Roig uses landscape and the natural world as a lens to connect to where she is now but also to unpack the relationship to history she lost when her family fled Cuba.
Drawing from the perceptual to conceptual experiences of landscape, Garcia-Roig’s paintings use the materiality and process of paint to explore her own connections to land and place. Her most extensive and widely shown works are from the “Cumulative Nature” and “Hyperbolic Nature” series. These large-scale, often multi-panel, cumulative “plein air” paintings are made over the course of the entire day(s) and capture the multidimensional and ever-changing experience of being in and connecting to a specific location. Often traveling across the US, these on-site works are immersive expressions of bodily movement, capturing fleeting moments of time while revealing both the illusionistic and abstract possibilities of painting. In her Cuba-centered series, she uses Cuban soil as the medium to depict images of her homeland in dialog with the Albers square of her Bauhausian education.
Throughout all her series, Garcia-Roig’s practice links her Cuban and American identities in different ways by speaking to the differences in the experience of place—the closeness of the American South versus the forced distance of the Cuban landscape. Referencing histories of painting, representations of land, and legacies of place, the works express the complexity of her hyphenated identity.
She has shown at many museums including: El Chopo Museum in Mexico City, Americas Society Gallery in NYC, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Art Museum of the Americas, Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA in Long Beach, CA), Portland Museum of Art, AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, Colby Art Museum, Huntsville Museum of Art, The America’s Society, The Painting Center in NYC, and has shown in most museums in Texas and Florida. She has works in numerous museum collections including The Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).
Her MFA is from the University of Pennsylvania and her BFA is from Southern Methodist University. From 1991 to 2000 she was a tenured Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin before moving to Tallahassee to teach at Florida State University where she served as Director of Graduate Studies to Chair of the Art Department and is currently a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished University Professor.
Major awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Blackwell Prize in Painting, Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting, Mid-America Arts Alliance/NEA Fellowship Award in Painting, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship Award and Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. Residencies include a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Artist’s Fellowship, Hambidge Arts Center, MacDowell Milton & Sally Avery Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Center, Art Omi Milton & Sally Avery Fellow, Millay CORE Fellow, Byrdcliffe Pollock- Krasner Fellow, Deering Estate, Surf Point, and as a visiting artist at the Ludwig Foundation in Havana, Cuba.