GONZÁLEZ Maria Elena

Maria Elena González is a Cuban American artist best known for her sculptural installations informed by architecture and personal experience.

In 1999, González received widespread acclaim for her site-specific sculpture Magic Carpet/Home, commissioned by the Public Art Fund. She has been a visiting critic in Sculpture at the Yale University School of Art, a resident faculty member at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and a visiting artist faculty member at The Cooper Union. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, the Prix de Rome, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. González is currently chair of the Board of Governors at Skowhegan.

González later explored connections between architecture and memory in more personal ways. In her 2002 installation at the Bronx Museum of Art, New York, Mnemonic Architecture, she reproduced, at life-size, the floor plan of her childhood home from a 32-year-old memory; the result was abstracted and disproportionate. In Internal DupliCity (2006), her architectural re-creations took the form of scale models, based on forms that include Renaissance villas, agrarian sheds, and Roman burial vaults. Installed on white pedestals, the models were largely obscured by an outer shell of frosted Plexiglas, conjuring visual associations of Catholic reliquaries (the predominant prerevolutionary religion of Cuba) and children's dollhouses, conveying a sense of inaccessibility and loss. Subsequent projects incorporate the viewer as an essential element in completing the work. For You & Me (2010), beams and platforms installed across the landscape of Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, invite participants to stand in designated spaces in the work, making them appear to others to be located on or within other works of art in the larger sculpture park.

González's first solo exhibition was at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York (1991). She has had solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions including El Museo del Barrio, New York (1996–97); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2002); Bronx Museum of Art (2002); Art in General, New York (2002–03); Contemporary Museum, Honolulu (2006); and Galerie Gisèle Linder, Basel (2005, 2009). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions, including Greater New York, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), New York (2000); Sonsbeek, Arnhem, Netherlands (2001); and The Shapes of Space, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007). She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2006. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Basel.