Lilian Garcia-Roig

Hyphenated Encounters

The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery + Deering Estate
September 17, 2026–January 17, 2027

The following materials are provided as background for the forthcoming feature on artist Lilian Garcia-Roig in Art Miami Magazine. We hope the article will introduce Garcia-Roig’s broader artistic practice while also highlighting the occasion of Hyphenated Encounters, a collaborative exhibition presented by The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery and Deering Estate.

1. FEATURE OVERVIEW / EDITORIAL CONTEXT

Cuba-born, Texas-raised artist Lilian Garcia-Roig has spent more than three decades expanding the possibilities of contemporary landscape painting through a practice grounded in direct observation, physical immersion, material experimentation, and an evolving investigation of place and belonging.

Opening September 17, 2026, Hyphenated Encounters brings together two interconnected exhibitions at The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery, offering the most comprehensive presentation of Garcia-Roig’s work to date.

The project pairs a career-spanning survey of paintings and mixed-media works with a focused presentation resulting from Garcia-Roig’s 2024 residency at Deering Estate. Together, the exhibitions examine how landscape functions throughout her practice not simply as subject matter, but as a means of negotiating perception, memory, cultural inheritance, displacement, and belonging.

The collaboration is presented through two distinct curatorial perspectives:

Hyphenated Encounters: A Practice of Place, curated by Sophie Bonet, Chief Curator of The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery, traces more than three decades of Garcia-Roig’s evolving relationship with landscape through paintings and mixed-media works spanning her career.

Deering Estate Residency: Lilian Garcia-Roig, Site, and the Labor of Belonging, curated by Liliam Dominguez, Head Curator of Deering Estate, focuses on work developed during Garcia-Roig’s 2024 residency at Deering Estate and considers her site-responsive practice in relation to the Estate’s landscape, histories, and ecological environment.

Together, the exhibitions reveal a practice in which landscape becomes a lived and continually negotiated relationship between body, history, memory, material, and place.

2. EXHIBITION SUMMARY

Hyphenated Encounters offers an expansive look at the work of Cuban American artist Lilian Garcia-Roig, bringing together a career-spanning survey of her artistic practice with a focused presentation of works created during her 2024 Deering Estate Artist-in-Residence residency.

Garcia-Roig is widely recognized for an approach to landscape painting rooted in prolonged observation and physical engagement with place. Working directly on-site, often over uninterrupted periods of many hours, she builds densely layered surfaces that register changing light, atmospheric conditions, bodily movement, and the cumulative experience of looking.

Across her practice, landscape gradually becomes a means of exploring broader questions of belonging, migration, cultural inheritance, ecological change, and geographic distance. From the subtropical environments of Florida to the limestone valleys of Viñales, Cuba, Garcia-Roig approaches place as something inhabited and continuously negotiated rather than simply observed.

In later bodies of work, these questions extend beyond direct observation. Cuban soil becomes pigment; geographically distant landscapes coexist within a single composition; and the traditions of Cuban landscape painting enter into conversation with the modernist visual language of her American artistic education.

The result is a body of work in which landscape remains simultaneously physical, cultural, historical, and deeply personal.

3. HYPHENATED ENCOUNTERS: A PRACTICE OF PLACE

Curated by Sophie Bonet, Chief Curator, The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery

Spanning more than three decades of artistic practice, Lilian Garcia-Roig: A Practice of Place brings together paintings and mixed-media works tracing the artist’s sustained engagement with landscape.

The exhibition follows Garcia-Roig’s practice from her immersive plein-air paintings through later bodies of work addressing Cuba, cultural inheritance, materiality, and hybrid geographies.

Throughout these works, painting becomes an embodied process. Rather than presenting landscape as a fixed view, Garcia-Roig records the experience of remaining within a place: looking, moving, responding, and allowing perception to accumulate over time.

Her dense painted surfaces continually shift between representation and abstraction. Roots, leaves, rocks, branches, and passages of color compete for attention while the physical presence of paint remains visible. The viewer is invited into the illusion of the landscape while simultaneously being returned to the material surface of the painting itself.

Questions of belonging gradually emerge from this sustained relationship with place. Garcia-Roig’s return to Cuba and her paintings made in Viñales opened a new conversation with the history of Cuban landscape painting. Subsequent works incorporate Cuban earth directly into their surfaces or place multiple geographies—particularly Cuba and the United States—within the same pictorial field.

Across the exhibition, landscape becomes less a depiction of territory than a means of exploring how proximity to place is built, interrupted, remembered, and continually renegotiated.

4. DEERING ESTATE RESIDENCY: LILIAN GARCIA-ROIG, SITE, AND THE LABOR OF BELONGING

Curated by Liliam Dominguez, Head Curator, Deering Estate

Garcia-Roig is widely recognized as an on-site painter, though the term only begins to describe her practice. Rather than painting landscape from a distance, she works directly within it, treating each location as a living field of negotiation between memory, perception, and presence.

During her 2024 residency at Deering Estate, Garcia-Roig immersed herself in the property’s subtropical environment, painting among its mangroves, gumbo-limbos, banyans, strangler figs, and limestone shoreline.

The residency held particular resonance for an artist whose relationship with tropical landscape has long been intertwined with her Cuban heritage. Born in Havana and raised in the United States, Garcia-Roig encountered at Deering many of the species and ecological conditions that connect South Florida to the Caribbean environment of her birthplace.

The resulting paintings extend her longstanding investigation of landscape as a space of both observation and belonging. They also enter into a larger history of sustained attention to the Deering Estate landscape, where artists, botanists, naturalists, and researchers have studied and documented the environment for more than a century.

The presentation is accompanied by a short film by fellow Artist-in-Residence Jorge Gonzalez Graupera, further exploring Garcia-Roig’s relationship to site, process, and place.

5. ABOUT THE ARTIST

Lilian Garcia-Roig

Lilian Garcia-Roig is a Cuba-born, Texas-raised artist whose work explores landscape, place, memory, and cultural identity through painting and mixed media. She lives and teaches in Tallahassee, Florida, while also maintaining a studio in Kerhonkson, New York.

Working extensively on-site, Garcia-Roig is known for large-scale, densely painted works created through prolonged encounters with specific environments. Her practice draws upon both the perceptual experience of landscape and its cultural and historical associations, particularly the complex relationship between the United States and Cuba that has shaped her own biography.

Garcia-Roig earned her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and her BFA from Southern Methodist University. She taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1991 to 2000 before joining Florida State University, where she has served in numerous academic leadership positions and is currently a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished University Professor.

Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Art Museum of the Americas, Museum of Latin American Art, Portland Museum of Art, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Colby College Museum of Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, Americas Society, and The Painting Center, among many others. Her work is represented in numerous public and museum collections, including Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Garcia-Roig’s honors include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting, Blackwell Prize in Painting, Mid-America Arts Alliance/NEA Fellowship Award in Painting, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, and the Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art.

Her residencies and fellowships include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Joan Mitchell Center, Art Omi, Millay Arts, Byrdcliffe, Deering Estate, and the Ludwig Foundation in Havana, among others.

6. ARTIST’S VOICE / KEY THEMES

Garcia-Roig describes her experience of identity as fundamentally “hyphenated,” shaped by Cuba, Texas, Florida, and the cultural spaces between them.

Born in Havana in 1966, she arrived in the United States with her family in 1970 and was raised in Houston. That experience of inhabiting multiple cultural contexts has become central to the way she understands landscape and place.

As Garcia-Roig explains:

“I was given a hyphenated name and have lived a hyphenated life.”

Throughout her practice, landscape functions as a means of connecting with where she is physically present while also examining her relationship with a Cuban history and geography from which she was separated at an early age.

Her plein-air paintings are created through sustained periods of direct observation and record not a single moment, but an accumulation of changing perceptions.

In later series including Hecho en Cuba, Hecho con Cuba, Re-Collecting Roig, and Hyphenated Nature, Garcia-Roig expands this inquiry through Cuban art history, family history, earth and botanical material, and the coexistence of multiple geographic and cultural references.

The concept of hyphenation therefore extends beyond biography. It becomes a way of understanding how different places, histories, and visual traditions can remain connected without collapsing into a single identity.

7. SELECTED THEMES FOR THE ARTICLE

Potential editorial threads include:

• Landscape as embodied experience: Garcia-Roig paints through prolonged physical immersion in a place rather than from a detached viewpoint.
• Time and accumulation: Her paintings record hours—and sometimes days—of changing perception, light, atmosphere, gesture, and bodily movement.
• Cuba and artistic inheritance: Her return to Cuba allowed Garcia-Roig to engage directly with the history of Cuban landscape painting and artists such as Domingo Ramos.
• Painting with place: In Hecho con Cuba, Cuban soil becomes part of the physical material of the paintings themselves.
• Hyphenated identity: Garcia-Roig’s work explores the possibility of inhabiting multiple geographic and cultural identities simultaneously.
• Florida as a connective landscape: South Florida’s subtropical environment creates ecological and cultural connections with Cuba that hold particular significance within her practice.
• Contemporary landscape painting: Garcia-Roig expands the genre beyond representation, using landscape to investigate perception, migration, materiality, history, ecological transformation, and belonging.

9. ABOUT THE COLLABORATION

Hyphenated Encounters is a collaborative project between The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery and Deering Estate, bringing together complementary curatorial perspectives around Garcia-Roig’s practice.

The Frank’s presentation situates the artist’s recent work within more than three decades of artistic development, while the Deering Estate presentation focuses closely on work emerging from the artist’s 2024 residency and her sustained engagement with that particular landscape.

Together, the exhibitions create an expanded portrait of an artist for whom landscape operates simultaneously as physical environment, artistic tradition, cultural inheritance, and lived experience.

10. ABOUT THE FRANK C. ORTIS ART GALLERY

Named in honor of former Pembroke Pines Mayor Frank C. Ortis for his longstanding commitment to the arts, The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery—known simply as The Frank—is the City of Pembroke Pines’ contemporary art center.

Through exhibitions, educational programs, public events, and community partnerships, The Frank presents regional, national, and international artists while fostering creativity, dialogue, and lifelong learning.

Located within the Charles F. Dodge City Center, The Frank offers multidisciplinary exhibitions and public programming connecting artists and audiences through meaningful experiences with contemporary art.

TheFrankGallery.org
[email protected]

11. ABOUT DEERING ESTATE

Located along Biscayne Bay in Miami, Deering Estate is a cultural and ecological landmark encompassing historic architecture, significant natural environments, archaeological resources, and contemporary cultural programming.

Owned by the State of Florida and managed by the Miami-Dade County Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces Department, the Estate is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is one of Miami-Dade County’s designated Heritage Parks.

The Deering Estate AT program partners with cultural institutions to extend the work of Deering Estate Artists-in-Residence beyond the Estate and expand opportunities for artists and audiences through exhibitions, performances, and collaborative programming.

The partnership with The Frank reflects the program’s commitment to supporting current and former Artists-in-Residence while building connections across South Florida’s cultural institutions.