María Elena González

González received a BFA in 1979 from Florida International University, and an MA in sculpture in 1983 from San Francisco State University. She had her first solo exhibition in New York in 1991 at the Nuyorican Poets Café. González has been awarded grants from organizations that include the Cintas Foundation (1989, 1994); the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1991, 1998); Anonymous Was a Woman (1997); the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (1997); the Joan Mitchell Foundation (1998); the Creative Capital Foundation (1999, 2001); The Cuban Artists Fund (2000); the Penny McCall Foundation (2001); and the New York State Council on the Arts (2003). She was recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome for 2003–04, and was a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow. In 2013 she won the Grand Prize at the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

María Elena González (born 1957 in Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban-American artist best known for her sculptural installations. Gonzalez was raised as Roman Catholic, but once she moved to the United States at age 11 she stopped following that religion. She immigrated to the United States in 1968. In 1999, González received widespread acclaim for her site-specific outdoor sculpture, Magic Carpet/Home. Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, it was originally installed in Brooklyn, New York, and subsequently in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Los Angeles, California. In the summer of 2005, González was a resident faculty member at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2005 and 2008, she was also a Visiting Artist faculty member at the Cooper Union School of Art. She currently teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.