María Elena González

María Elena González, "Tree Talk" exhibition, Mills College Art Museum, 2019.

María Elena González (born 1957) is a Cuban-American sculptor based in Brooklyn and the Bay Area. She is known for objects, installations and public art that interweave post-minimalist form, conceptual art and concern for materials and craft. Her early work explored themes of memory, family, identity, loss and dislocation through formal, architectural and mapping modes that address site, place and social circumstances; her later work makes connections between nature and art, engaging a broad range of media and sensory experience. In 2020, artist and scholar Ellen Levy wrote "González's art re-invents nature as culture" through an "exquisite attunement" that uncovers formal and thematic analogies between both realms and synesthetic connections between visual and aural senses.

González has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, among other recognition. Her work belongs to the public collections of international museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum of Arts and Design, and Museum Arnhem (The Netherlands). Her work has appeared in surveys including "Greater New York" (MoMA PS1, 2000), Sonsbeek 9 (2001), "The Shapes of Space" (Guggenheim Museum, 2007), "Home: So Different, So Appealing" (LACMA, 2017), and "Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago" (Museum of Latin American Art, 2017).

In addition to her art practice, González has taught at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Cooper Union and the San Francisco Art Institute(SFAI). Peter Schjeldahl described the work's LACMA presentation (2017) as "laconically unsettling" in its superimposition of cramped quarters on a playground structure in a grassy park. The first show conveyed a mood of unease and suppressed emotional energy that centered on a fragile, ominous-looking electrical tower structure that was repeated in hand-altered photographic negatives, a small glass sculpture, and a silhouette traced on paper with fingernail clippings.

Later projects and exhibitions In subsequent years, González has moved toward a deep contemplation of nature and landscape, explored in a synesthetic body of work engaging diverse materials, media (sound, video, music, sculpture and works on paper) and the visual, aural, tactile and kinetic senses. Fascinated with the white bark and its code-like black lines and striations (lenticels), she began stripping it from fallen trees, striving to capture the distinct "personality" of each one in vellum collages, flattened presentations and rubbings (e.g., Bark Framed #5, 2012; T2 (Bark), 2015). The resulting "scores"— played on actual player pianos as performances or recordings within several exhibitions—have been described by reviewers as unexpectedly modern, "dark and atonal," They included a video installation depicting a view of Lake Wesserunsett (where she first conceived the Tree Talk series) joined by two miniature chairs crafted from birch collected on-site; cylindrical objects made in wood, concrete and ceramic that echoed the shape of the piano music roll; large-scale rubbings and abstracted drawings of bark grain; and framed fragments of the actual bark. For the Mills College show, González collaborated with composers John Ivers and Marc Zollinger.

González's subsequent series, titled "Repairs" (2020– ), developed out of "Tree Talk," the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of SFAI, as well as broader concerns regarding the environment and material consumption. Its sculptures have been sourced from broken and discarded materials—damaged ceramic mugs and plates, found porcelain and wood scraps—that she collects or "repairs" to create new works.

Recognition González has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim (2006) and Fleishhacker (2019) foundations, the American Academy in Rome Prize (2003–04), and the grand prize of the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts (2013). She has received grants from the Cintas Foundation (1989, 1994), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1991, 1998, 2010), Anonymous Was a Woman (1997), Joan Mitchell Foundation (1998), and Creative Capital (1999),