FSU Art Professor Lilian Garcia-Roig currently has a solo exhibition titled, “Legacy of Place” at the Moss Art Center on the Virginia Tech Campus in Blacksburg, VA. The show runs through September 2 and she will be having a public artist-curator conversation on Thursday, August, 25.
Born in Havana, Cuba; raised in Texas; and presently living in Tallahassee, Florida, Lilian Garcia-Roig’s landscape paintings examine ideas of place, belonging, identity, and perceptual experience. Legacy of Place features work from four of the artist’s series, including Plein-Aired Histories, Fluid Perception: Banyan as Metaphor, Hyphenated Nature, and Hecho con 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 on-site works, painted over the course of an entire day, are immersive expressions of bodily movement, fleeting moments of time, and the illusionistic and abstracting possibilities of painting.
Garcia-Roig’s practice links her Cuban and American identities. In the included four series, she speaks 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.