Congratulations to gallery artist María Elena González and her works' inclusion in Beyond the Sounds of Silence. Latin-American Artists Connecting Sound, Art, and Society at the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami. Curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective, this exhibition explores image, sound, memory, and perception through the form and language of musical implements, including the human voice. The exhibition brings together leading voices in contemporary art from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Thank you to the curators and to the team at the Lowe!
Additionally, María Elena González will join Lowe Art Museum Director Dr. Jill Deupi for a virtual conversation on Wednesday, August 25 at 5:30pm to discuss her work and the exhibition. You can register for the event through the Lowe Art Museum website.
Congratulations to María Elena González on her inclusion in Caribbean Transitions at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center! Curated by Keith Morrison, this exhibition explores the character, complexity, and originality of art by Caribbean American artists as they expand the art of the North American continent. The 20 artists in the exhibition are respected internationally, and many are represented in major museums in the United States and abroad. Their work spans painting, printmaking, photography, video, and installation. These artists reveal unique relationships between the Caribbean and the US in ways that expand and enrich a wider understanding of American art and culture. The Caribbean is the historic fulcrum of the cultures of the Americas and the art in this exhibition exemplifies that importance.
Congratulations to gallery artist María Elena González on her inclusion in Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art at the Vincent Price Art Museum! Curated by Javier Arellano Vences, Pilar Tompkins Rivas, and Joseph Daniel Valencia, this landmark exhibition focuses on sound practices by Latinx artists, both past and present. The intergenerational artist list includes 30 artists and collectives and we are thrilled that María Elena González is counted among them.
Congratulations to María Elena González on the opening of "Tree Talk Series" at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center! After its successful run at the Mills College Art Museum, H&A Modern is thrilled to see this important project travel to Brattleboro.
This exhibition marks the culmination of Tree Talk, a series of work developed over 10 years by internationally recognized Brooklyn and Bay Area-based artist María Elena González.
Organized in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, HOME—So Different, So Appealing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art features U.S. Latino and Latin American artists from the late 1950s to the present who have used the deceptively simple idea of "home" as a powerful lens through which to view the profound socioeconomic and political transformations in the hemisphere. Spanning seven decades and covering art styles from Pop Art and Conceptualism to “anarchitecture” and “autoconstrucción,” the artists featured in this show explore one of the most basic social concepts by which individuals, families, nations, and regions understand themselves in relation to others. In the process, their work also offers an alternative narrative of postwar and contemporary art.
June 11, 2017–October 15, 2017
Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago at the Museum of Latin American Art, curated by Dr. Tatiana Flores, offers a reading of twenty-first century artistic production of the Caribbean that employs the archipelago as an analytical framework. The exhibition focuses, first and foremost, on locating thematic continuities in the art of the Caribbean islands. Through the trope of the archipelago, Relational Undercurrents challenges the understanding of the Caribbean as discontinuous, isolated, hermetic, and beyond comprehension. The exhibition is divided into four thematic sections: Conceptual Mappings, Perpetual Horizons, Landscape Ecologies and Representational Acts, and features work by artists who have informed and shaped those themes. The exhibition includes painting, installation art, sculpture, photography, video, and performance.
September 16, 2017–January 28, 2018
Cuban-born artist María Elena González (b. 1957) is an internationally recognized sculptor based in Brooklyn, NY, and the San Francisco Bay Area, CA. González interweaves the conceptual with a strong dedication to craft in her complex installations and poetic arrangements, exploring themes like identity, memory, and dislocation. Over a career spanning thirty years she has won the Prix de Rome (2003), and more recently, Grand Prize at the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts at Ljubljana, Slovenia (2013). She was a Guggenheim Fellow (2006) and has been awarded grants from numerous foundations including Anonymous Was a Woman, Creative Capital, Pollock-Krasner (4 time recipient), Joan Mitchell, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Penny McCall, among others. Additionally, she has served as the Sculpture Commissioner for the Design Commission of the City of New York. González has taught at the Cooper Union School of Art, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, among others, and served, until its closing, as a tenured Associate Professor and Chair of the Sculpture Department at the San Francisco Art Institute.
In 1999, González received widespread acclaim for her site-specific sculpture Magic Carpet/Home, commissioned by the Public Art Fund, and another site-specific work titled You & Me (2010), commissioned by Storm King Art Center. Her Tree Talk project was selected for a monographic presentation at the 2016 ADAA Art Show.
In 2017–2018, her work was featured in Home So Different, So Appealing, presented by the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) and organized in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Additionally in 2017, González’s work was exhibited at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), in Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago [As part of the Getty-funded Pacific Standard Time exhibition program], which traveled to Columbia University’s Wallach Museum of Art, the Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami, FL, and the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, ME. Her room-sized installation Self-Service (1993-96) was recreated as part of About Face: Stonewall, Revolt and the New Queer, curated by Jonathan Katz, at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, IL, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in 2019.
González’s work can be found in numerous public collections including the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; Museum voor Modern Kunst, Arnhem, The Netherlands; Museum of Art, The Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; The Museum of Arts and Design, New York; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
