Gallery Talk and Exhibition Opening by Renowned Artist
The City of Lake Charles will host a new art exhibition entitled Natural Exuberance beginning Thursday, March 13, at the 1911 Historic City Hall Arts & Cultural Center at 1001 Ryan Street. The artist, Lilian Garcia-Roig will conduct a gallery talk during the opening reception. The doors will open at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6pm. The event is open to all ages at no charge. The exhibition will hang through Saturday, April 19, 2014.
Lilian Garcia-Roig was born in Havana, Cuba in 1966 and lives in Tallahassee, Florida. Her latest works feature large-scale on-site painting installations of dense landscapes 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. Her works are as much about the materiality of the paint and the physicality of the painting process as they are about mixing and mashing the illusionist possibilities of painting with its true abstract nature. (www.liliangarcia-roig.com)
Garcia-Roig has shown extensively in the south, especially in Texas and Florida, and around the country including the Americas Society Gallery in NYC, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Art Museum of the Americas, both in Washington D.C. Internationally, she has shown at the Chopo Museum in Mexico City and Byblos Art Gallery in Verona, Italy.
Among her major awards are a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting, a Mid-America Arts Alliance/NEA Fellowship Award in Painting, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship Award, Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art, and fellowship residencies to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell Colony and the Ludwig Foundation in Havana, Cuba.
Garcia-Roig holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and is professor of painting at Florida State University. She was a tenured associate professor of Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin from 1991 to 1999 and in 2000 was a visiting associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley in the department of Art Practice before deciding to move to Tallahassee to become FSU’s Director of Graduate Studies in Studio Art.
Historic City Hall is open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is free, but donations are gladly accepted. Charlestown Farmers’ Market is open on Bilbo Street behind the center every Saturday 8 a.m.-noon. For more information, please call 491-9147 or visit www.cityoflakecharles.com.