Maya Lin

b. 1960

Maya Lin, sculptor, architect, and site-specific artist, has created a notable body of work, including a memorial to civil rights in Montgomery, Alabama; large-scale environmental art, such as “Wavefield” at Storm King Art Center in New York; and her “Women’s Table,” commemorating the 20th anniversary of allowing women to attend Yale University after nearly two centuries of exclusion.

However, it is for her “Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial,” one of the most compelling monuments in the United States, that she is best known.  When she was just a student at Yale, she won the competition to design the “Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial” 1981-1983 in Washington, D.C. The names of the 57,939 Americans killed in this war are carved into stark black granite panels.

When she was a freshman and sophomore at Yale, she saw stonecutters carving the names of Yale alumni killed in war.  Lin would pass through this Memorial Rotunda often.  “I had never been able to resist touching the names cut into these marble walls.  It left a lasting impression on me . . . the sense of the power of a name.”  Lin has cited this Memorial Rotunda and the carving of names as an influence on her work on the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial.

Her Minimalist-inspired design consists of two almost 250-foot-long walls of polished black granite, set into a gradual rise, meeting at a 136 degree angle at the point where the walls and slope would be at their full 10-foot height. The names of the dead were incised in the stone in the order in which they died, with only the dates of the first and last deaths – ‘1959’ and ‘1975’ – recorded.  Its mirror-like, polished granite walls have been acclaimed for creating a place of calm and healing as they allow visitors to see their own reflections when they read the names of the dead.  Mementos and flowers are left below the names.

In a similar but smaller vein Lin has made a floor art sculpture piece, consisting of three concentric circles of white marble.  The center circle is the “Arctic Circle”; the middle piece is “Latitude New York City,” and the outer circle is “Equator,” 2013-2014.  This work was featured in the Palm Springs Art Museum.

For more than a decade, Lin has tracked the disappearance of plants and animals from specific landscapes through her multimedia online project, “What Is Missing?”  It is a global memorial to the planet.  She is currently working on her fifth memorial which focuses on “Mapping the Future.”  It has interactive maps that showcase nature-based solutions to carbon emissions.

Her “Ghost Forest” is a public art project in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park. This piece is intended to draw attention to a native tree that was decimated by habitat loss and climate change. The project includes a sound-scape, accessible via smartphone, with calls and songs of animals once common to Manhattan, plus a planting project that will place 1,000 native trees and shrubs in New York City parks.

Lin’s maquette of the Vancouver Land Bridge, she designed in collaboration with architect Johnpaul Jones, will be the centerpiece of “Along the Columbia River: Maya Lin and the Confluence Project,” will be on view at Whitman College’s Maxey Museum in Washington State and online.

In 2016, she was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama for “bringing awareness to the planet’s loss of habitat and biodiversity.”

More here.