Lilian Garcia-Roig
Period: Contemporary


Maple Mash Up 1
Enredo de Arces 1, 2013
oil on canvas
30 x 24 inches

Lilian Garcia-Roig, born in Havana, Cuba, in 1966, earned her BFA in 1988 from Southern Methodist University and her MFA in 1990 from the University of Pennsylvania. She served as Director of Graduate Studies in Visual Art at Florida State University from 2002 to 2008 and is currently a tenured professor at the institution.


A plein-air landscape artist, Garcia-Roig engages with the environment in a direct and passionate way, capturing the essence of nature and the painting process. Her work blurs the lines between abstraction and representation, inviting viewers into dense, complex landscapes where figure-ground relationships shift dynamically. As she says, “These scenes offer the most potential for the interchange of figure-ground relationships, where colors and marks are simultaneously thick on the surface and give the illusion of space.”


She describes her style as “maximalist,” where no sensory, psychological, or perceptual element escapes her approach.


Garcia-Roig has received numerous prestigious awards and residencies, including the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. Other honors include the 2023 Pollock-Krasner Byrdcliffe Artist Residency and recognition as FSU’s Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor. She has also earned the 2021 Blackwell Prize in Painting, the 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist-in-Residence, and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others.

Garcia-Roig's recent solo exhibitions include Plein-Aired Histories at the FSU Museum of Fine Arts (2023) and Legacy of Place at Moss Arts Center, Virginia Tech (2022). Notable recent group shows include Texas Landscapes from the Permanent Collection at the Grace Museum, Abilene, TX; Surroundings: Works from the Permanent Collection at the Tyler Museum of Art, Tyler, TX; In the Eye’s Mind: Landscapes of Cuba at the Frost Museum of Art (2022); Imitation of Life at the Huntsville Museum of Art (2021); The 2021 Permanent Collection Exhibition at Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM); The Wiregrass Biennial, Wiregrass Museum of Art; Dothan, GA, (2020, where she won the People's Choice Award); and Relational Undercurrents at the Portland Museum of Art (2019). Her work has been extensively exhibited across the U.S. in venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art (FL), the Huntsville Museum of Art (AL), and the Florida Museum for Women Artists, among many others.