Lilian Garcia-Roig Appointed Chair of the FSU Department of Art

The College of Fine Arts is pleased to announce Lilian Garcia-Roig has been appointed Chair of the Department of Art effective August 7, 2020. The College and Department extend thanks to Professor Stephanie James, who has served as Chair since 2018.

Not only is Professor Lilian Garcia-Roig a highly accomplished artist and a long-time faculty member in the FSU Department of Art, she is an experienced administrator, having chaired previously and been a faculty member at other major institutions. She brings significant outside professional experience and a sense of institutional memory from which we are sure to benefit. Lilian is a tenacious advocate on behalf of the Art Department and a welcomed addition to the College of Fine Arts leadership team.

– James Frazier, Dean

Lilian Garcia-Roig has been Professor in the FSU Department of Art since 2001. She has served as Director of Graduate Studies in Studio Art (2002-2008), Painting and Drawing Area Head, and on various department, college, and university committees. In addition, she is the founder and Director of Art on Campus.

Born in Havana, Cuba in 1966, she was raised and worked in Texas for 30 years before moving to Tallahassee, Florida. Garcia-Roig holds a BFA from Southern Methodist University and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. From 1991 to 2000 she 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.

She is most known for her visceral, on-site painting series of dense landscapes from across the country as well as for her large-scale installations 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.

In 2017 she was an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in NOLA where she developed an entirely new body of work (“Hecho Con Cuba”) that responded to her experience of finally being able to work on-site in her homeland earlier that year.  Currently she continues to expand on the idea of “hyphenating“ her perceptually-based practice in the U.S. with her conceptually-based Cuban themed works.

Her works have been exhibited nationally and internationally in over 300 shows including numerous museum group and solo shows at such places as the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Art Museum of the Americas, both in Washington D.C., the Americas Society Gallery in NYC, the Chopo Museum in Mexico City and Byblos Art Gallery in Verona, Italy. She had a large work included in “Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago” that opened in 2017 at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California as one of the Getty funded Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA  exhibitions which traveled to several museums across the country through 2019. Recently she was included in the 2019 Florida Prize in Contemporary Art exhibition at the Orlando Museum of Art and in the Florida Contemporary at the Baker Museum in Naples.

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 being a visiting artist at the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba, a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center Artist Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Milton & Sally Avery Fellowship.

For more information on the FSU Department of Art, visit art.fsu.edu.