The John Simon Guggenheim Committee has selected our Professor and Chair Lilan Garcia-Roig as a winner for the prestigious 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship for Art. There were 3,000 applicants nationwide Garcia-Roig is one of 184 artists, scholars and writers who will be funded up to $45,000 for six to 12 months to expand their research practices.
The Guggenheim Fellowship will give Garcia-Roig an opportunity to explore her connection to Cuba. She will investigate links between her work as a painter and the scientific work of her great uncle, the renowned Cuban botanist Juan Tomás Roig, who cataloged and collected Cuban plants.
“I’ve always thought about the world visually, and this will be a journey of discovery. Why not me?”
Her paintings, as a reflection of that mind, portray the natural world as a kaleidoscope of commanding colors and alternating thicknesses that pull us deeply into a forest’s shadows, then expel us, confetti-like, amid twists of red, green and brown. While her parents tried to steer here towards a business career, Garcia-Roig asked herself “Why couldn’t I be an artist?”
Her willingness to try, to step forward, to work and to “presume the possibility” has led Garcia-Roig to 17 major national awards, fellowships and residencies — among them, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting, a Mid-America Arts Alliance/NEA Fellowship Award in Painting, a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship and a Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. She was a visiting artist at the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba, and she secured a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship.
Read entire article