What is central to Magic Carpet/Home is that these issues about home are transformed into the idiom of play, and that the idea of home is opened up rather than enclosed, becoming indistinguishable from the outside against which home is usually defined. González is not equating the Cuban exile with the Great Migration, nor is she equating sexual repression with racialized poverty, but she is bringing them into the home. González's Magic Carpet/Home was part of a public art program by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions-on in which the artists engaged city agencies and consulted community organizations and residents in an art-based effort to redefine public space in relation to home, and vice versa. It is during this period, as part of the Great Migration from the South, that Watts became predominantly African American, with families confronting racial violence, overcrowding, high rents, and limited access to basic services (health care, schools, and transportation). Nickerson Gardens is one of four housing projects built by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) during World War II in Watts, a high-density two-square mile neighborhood in South Los Angeles. María Elena González, C-Carpet, 2001, courtesy of the artist and Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, © María Elena González Once in Cuba, González had a chance to see the distorted proportions of the “memory that was imprinted on my mind when I left Cuba.” These drawings were exhibited at the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba in Havana in 2000 when she visited the island for the first time since leaving 32 years earlier.
#MAGIC CARPET DRAWING SERIES#
Over the next year, the artist began works of “imaginary architecture,” including a Mnemonic Architecture series of drawings of her childhood home in Cuba based on memory. In 1999, González did earlier iterations of Magic Carpet/Home using public housing and parks in Brooklyn and Pittsburgh.
In 2003, the work was located near the apartment building in Ted Watkins Park, where local residents could interact with and play on the sculpture over a six-month period. Titled Magic Carpet/Home (2003/2017), it recreates the original 2003 installation based on an apartment in Watts. This work is by artist María Elena González (Cuba, b. María Elena González, Magic Carpet/Home, 2003, courtesy of the artist and Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, © María Elena González
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