2004: National Museum of Women in the Arts Exhibition

“Thicket” Triptych 48″ x 108″, 2004. This was the painting I exhibited and it was always hung on the title wall at the entry of the exhibition. Private collection Florida.

2004 was an important year for me as far as creating and exhibiting larger-scale Florida-based works and being acknowledged as a significant Florida artist. An example and highlight of this was being included in the exhibition Transitory Patters: Florida Women Artists that opened at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. in 2004 and then traveled to several museums across the state of Florida including the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz was the guest curator for the exhibition and she also contributed an essay for the catalog titled: Calm and Cacophony.

Jurors/curators for the exhibition were Bonnie Clearwater, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Lori Mertes, curator at the Miami Art Museum; Margaret Miller, director of the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum; Rena Minar, former director of the Mary Brogan Museum of Art & Science; and Sue Scott, adjunct curator at the Orlando Museum of Art.

Out of the over 700 submissions, the 19 artists selected to be included in the exhibition were: Teresita Fernández, Naomi Fisher, Victoria Gitman, Mernet Larson, Lynne Golob Gelfman, Francie Bishop Good, Carol Brown, Natalia Benedetti, Julie Davidow,  Maria Martinez-Cañas, Beatriz Monteavaro, Dara Friedman, Suzanne McClelland, Aida Ruilova, Jennifer Morgan, Vickie Pierre, Marisa Tellería-Díez, and Wendy Wischer.

Below is a link to the press release about the exhibition

TransitoryPatternsFloridaWomenArtists at NMWA

64 page color catalog for exhibition

This catalog can be purchased from Amazon.com

2004: “A Mysterious Clarity”

A Mysterious Clarity is the title to a show that featured three FSU painters (Ray Burggraf, Mark Messersmith & me) who all use landscape as their point of departure for their distinct, yet strangely strongly related works.  This show opened at 621 Gallery in Tallahassee in 2004 and was so popular and successful that it traveled to numerous other museums and galley venues in FL, GA & TX. This year 621 invited us back to have an updated decade show…what are we doing now…called A Mysterious Clarity 2.0.

2004: “Sight on Site”

“Branch Ladder” 24″ x 28″, 2003. In private collection Dallas

In November of 2004 I had my fourth solo show at Valley House Gallery in Dallas, TX.  This exhibit titled Sight on Site featured some of my first works from the foothills of the Cascades Mountains in western Washington, northeast of Seattle.  Although I had been to Seattle several times before for short family visits, I did not realize that I could actually try to spend extended time there until the summer 2003. That year my in-laws purchased a very small cabin in the woods and when they took us up to see it, I thought that it was visually compelling that I instantly felt a deep desire, or rather NEED, to paint there even though I had no supplies or strategy to get the works back if I did manage to paint. Luckily my family is sympathetic to my artistic temperament so I was able to basically abandoned my them for the rest of the visit.  I immediately drove into the city and went to Daniel Smith Art Supply store where I purchased eight 24″ x 18″ canvases, brushes, paints, etc.  and then drove back up to the cabin where I painted non-stop until the day before our flight back to Tallahassee.

That brief but wonderful time in the Cascades Mountains left me determined to figure out how I could manage to spend the entire summer painting there. Luckily I was awarded a 2004 (COFRS) summer research grant from FSU which provided the means for me to do just that. The works I created over that summer proved to be the foundation for an ever growing series of larger Washington works: works that ultimately lead to several large-scale painting installations and shows.

“Maple & Fern Grove” (WA) diptych 48″ x 72″. 2004. On loan to the FSU President’s Office.

“Blue Stump” (WA) 48″ x 36″, 2004

2004: “Rouge Nations”

“Rogue Nations”: Cuban & Chinese Artists  was an exhibition curated by Antonio Eligio Fernandez (Tonel), Anjee Helstrup and David Spalding that examined conceptual approaches and links between contemporary artists that had a global perspective on art and politics outside of their respective communist home nations. I had four of my Post-Post Cuba Diaries print works included in the exhibition. In this series I used imagery and symbols inspired by multiple conflicted relationships with Cuba as a point of departure.  The prints in this exhibit were produce in the Kala Print Studios in Berkeley, CA after my 1999 trip to Havana where I was a visiting artist at the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba.

The exhibition featured works by Juan Carlos Alom, Felipe Dulzaides, Kattia Garcia Fayat, Nereida Garcia-Ferraz, Lilian Garcia-Roig, Manuel Pina, Juan Carlos Quintana, Song Dong, Tang Hui, Jose Toriac, Wang Qingsong, Yang Shaobin, Yang Zhenzhong, Yin Xiuzhen, Zhan Wang and Zhou Tiehai.

The exhibition was held at the Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana Gallery in San Jose, CA from, July 28-September 4, 2004

Catalog with curatorial essay and biographies-Length 12 pages, published by MACLA, Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, 2004

From the Post-Post Cuba Diaries: “Birth Prints”, etching, 14″ x 14″, 2000

2004: Featured Hispanic Artist for the State of Florida

 

“Translation Trance: El Principe Guerrero”, mono print, 39″ x 31″ (Produced at Strike Editions, 1994)

In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month in September, the governor of the state of Florida selects an artist each year to exhibit artwork in the State Capital Plaza Gallery. In 2004 I was invited to be the Feature Artist during the month-long celebrations and activities. Apart from showing some of my most recent on-sight Florida landscape paintings, I decided to respond to the month’s Hispanic-centric theme by also exhibiting a series works on paper that were clearly about specific Latino-themed motifs and imagery. The Translation Trance series was based on iconic, high art images from the “Old World”-Spain (Velazquez) and the “New World”-Latin America, but more specifically, by various images of Meso-American stylized figurative sculptures. Most of these Translation Trance works were produced in Austin, Texas as a visiting artist at Strike Editions and at Coronado Studio’s Serie Project.

“Translation Trance: La Infanta Morena”, mono print, 39″ x 31″ (Produced at Strike Editions, 1994)

Note that many of the Translation Trance works are reproduced and explained in the publication Reflexciones: New Directions in Mexican American Studies, Neil Foley issue editor; published by CMAS UT Press 1997, cover image and p.71-76.

Work from this series is also included in a book titled Triumph of our Communities published by Bilingual Review/Press Hispanic Research Center, Arizona State University, 1995. Both can be ordered on Amazon.com

In addition, my print Translation Trance: La Infant Teotihuacana (from Serie II-1995) can be seen at serieproject.org

La Infanta Teotihuacana, 1995, screen print, 17″ x 22″

A Decade of Highlights: 2004-2014

“Tree Ravine Diptych” (FL) 30″ x 48″

Over the past year I have been working on two shows that each dealt with the idea of a decade. One was the “A Mysterious Clarity 2.0”, a show that brought back, but in updated form in 2014, the original 2004 grouping of Burggraf, Garcia-Roig & Messersmith at 621 Gallery’s show “A Mysterious Clarity” and the other is my upcoming (fall 2015) solo exhibition at Cernuda Arte in Coral Gables titled “In the Thick of It: A Decade of Painting in Florida”. The latter will have an exhibition catalog with a curatorial essay by Carol Damian, Director of the Frost Museum at FIU.

Because I came to blogging later in my artistic career and because I have been actively working with the concept of a decade it made sense to me to use the decade theme here as a way to summarize highlights from my fairly recent past so as to better contextualize my current work for viewers. With this added back ground information, visitors to the studio news/blog will be able to better understand where I am coming from and where I might be going.

I will be posting a series of entries grouped by chronological order starting from 2004. The subjects of the entries will mostly be important art-related events such as exhibitions, awards, reviews, residencies, or even a major new series of works…but there will also be occasional MISC entries just because:)

Hello and Introduction

1966 baby pic…Oh the things I will see!!!

When people ask me where I am from, I instantly respond, “Do you mean where I was born, where I grew up, or where I live now?” Cuba, Texas, Florida? All of them? None of them? Cuban? American? Cuban-American? Maybe I exist only on the Hyphen…where ever that is. I honestly do not yet have an answer to what seems like a simple question to most people but below is an attempt to summarize at least who I am as an artist: what I do & have done.

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY: Lilian Garcia-Roig

Born in Havana, Cuba in 1966, I was raised and worked in Texas for 30 years but now live and work in Tallahassee, Florida. My latest works feature large-scale on-site painting installations of dense landscapes that overwhelm the viewer’s perceptual senses. Each individual painting is created over the course of the day in an intense wet-on-wet cumulative manner that underscores the complex nature of trying to capture first-hand the multidimensional and ever-changing experience of being in that specific location. My works are as much about the materiality of the paint and the physicality of the painting process as they are about mixing and mashing the illusionist possibilities of painting with its true abstract nature.

I have shown nationally at such places as the Americas Society Gallery in NYC, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Art Museum of the Americas, both in Washington D.C and extensively in the south, especially in Texas and Florida. Internationally, I have shown at the Chopo Museum in Mexico City and Byblos Art Gallery in Verona, Italy.

My MFA is from the University of Pennsylvania (1990) and my BFA is from Southern Methodist University (1988). From 1991 to 2000 I was a tenured Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin and in 2001 was a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of Art Practice before deciding to move to Tallahassee where I became the Director of Graduate Studies in Studio Art from 2002-2008. Currently I am a professor at FSU where I serve as the Painting and Drawing Area Head.

Major awards include a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting, a Mid-America Arts Alliance/NEA Fellowship Award in Painting, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship Award in painting & a Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art.  Residencies include a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Artists Fellowship, MacDowell Colony Milton & Sally Avery Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Center AIR and a visiting artist at the Ludwig Foundation in Havana, Cuba.

1986 Self-Portrait (while looking into mirror)