Her Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama displays inscriptions on a disc of black stone beneath a thin layer of moving water. In the first years after leaving Yale, Maya Lin created a dozen other major works across the nation, including the Peace Chapel at Pennsylvania’s Juniata College, the “Women’s Table” at Yale, and the Langston Hughes Library for the Children’s Defense Fund in Clinton, Tennessee. A large crowd of friends and relatives of those who served attended the dedication. Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, stands during the dedication on November 13, 1982. The families of the fallen leave mementos at the wall, and veterans maintain a constant vigil there. Her inspiring vision has since become the most-visited memorial in the nation’s capital. She coped with the painful controversy by returning to Yale as a graduate student. Feelings were running so high that her name was not even mentioned at the dedication of the memorial in 1982. She encountered ferocious criticism when her unconventional design was selected. Her striking proposal, a V-shaped wall of black stone, etched with the names of 58,000 dead soldiers, beat out the submissions of 1,420 other entrants. 21-year-old Yale architecture student Maya Lin with her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, May 6, 1981.Īs a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale, Lin designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a class project, then entered it in the largest design competition in American history. Each had fled China during the Communist takeover in 1949 they met in the United States and raised Maya and her brother Tan in the college town of Athens, Ohio. Her mother wrote poetry and taught literature her father, a ceramic artist, became the Dean of Fine Arts. Her parents were both professors at Ohio University. “I am always trying to find a balance between these opposing forces, the place where opposites meet.Maya Lin is the world-renowned architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, and one of the most important public artists of this century. “I feel I exist on the boundaries somewhere between science and art, art and architecture, public and private, East and West,” Lin wrote. Lin’s exhibit displays how her art uses contrasting ideas to create a space of exploration into people’s connection with nature and each other. After drawing inspiration from nature’s beauty and bountifulness her entire life, “What is Missing?” portrays a pensive and mournful exploration into how an artist copes with their muse dying. This piece of the exhibit emphasizes Lin’s overarching pull towards reimagining grief and loss. In the project description, Lin calls this piece her “final memorial” and an “anti-monument,” attempting to break from one’s idea of a monument by allowing her piece to exist in a physical and virtual space. I almost never see them now,” and “I have not heard the Bob Whites call their name in the state of New York since the 1980s.” One person wrote, “No more need of a bridge to cross the glacier if there is no ice left ” while others reminisce on the loss of wildlife: “I remember petting bumblebees as a child. In this multimedia project, titled “What is Missing?,” Lin prompts those who attend the exhibit to engage with how she perceives nature and share their personal experiences by writing down memories of natural wonders that were lost during their lifetime. Next to “Ghost Forest” hangs a wall-length map of the world filled in with anecdotes from audience members who’ve attended the exhibit. The shift in the Earth’s wellbeing is highlighted through Lin’s work the audience follows the exhibit in chronological order, with her subject matter transitioning from the beauty of nature to show how that beauty is impermanent. Lin has also advocated for protecting the environment, as shown by one of her most recent pieces, “ Ghost Forest.” This piece is a reflection of her experience witnessing a sea of Atlantic white cedars in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Throughout her career she has earned numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 under the Obama administration, for her work related to human rights and environmentalism. Lin seems to approach her work with humility and a sense of gratitude toward her family. “After school, my brother and I would walk over to our father’s studio and spend countless hours watching as our father kneaded the clay, pounding it, pushing it, cutting it through the wire.” “It wasn’t until after my father died that I realized the enormous impact he had on my work,” Lin wrote in a panel underneath her father’s work.
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