Celebrating Women's History

Maya Lin

1959-
Architect, sculptor

At the tender age of 21, Maya Lin became one of the most controversial artists in the United States. Her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., came under attack for a variety of reasons, but it would eventually become the most-visited monument in the country. Lin has worked on numerous public and private projects since then. Each has been praised for her creative and expressive treatment of the subject depicted. Some have also been severely criticized and even vandalized. Lin's ability to blend sculpture and architecture has earned her a reputation as one of the most innovative artists working today.

Maya Ying Lin grew up in Athens, Ohio, where her parents were on the faculty of Ohio University. Her father, Henry Lin, was dean of the art school and a ceramic artist. Her mother, Julia Lin, was a poet and professor of Asian and English literature. Both immigrated to the United States from China. Early on Lin displayed a talent for mathematics and art. She was a top-notch student and after high school was accepted to Yale University in Connecticut.

At Yale she was informed by her professors that she could study either sculpture or architecture, but not both. Lin admits that while she was officially a student in the architecture school, she used to sneak over to the art school to take sculpture classes. This double interest has been a curse and a blessing throughout Lin's career. "There's an incredible suspicion that if you're interested in two different disciplines, then you treat them lightly ... but I could never choose," she has said. Indeed, Lin's natural gifts and training in both fields contribute to the unique nature of her work.

Stirs Controversy with Vietnam Veterans Memorial

In October 1980 an organization called the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund announced it would sponsor a nationwide competition to design a memorial honoring those who had served in the Vietnam War. Nearly 1,500 aspiring artists submitted proposals. A panel of distinguished judges, including architects, sculptors, and landscape architects, chose the final design: a simple V-shaped wall of polished black stone inscribed with the names of the roughly 58,000 men and women who were killed in the war or declared missing in action. The designer was a senior architecture student at Yale named Maya Lin — a total unknown in the art world.

Soon after Lin's concept was approved by the appropriate government agencies, a group of veterans began to protest the design. Their leader called the wall a "black gash of shame" and said it was insulting to the memory of those who had died. They wanted a traditional white marble sculpture featuring figures of soldiers. This group even attacked Lin herself with sexist and racist slurs. The debate over the memorial — which mirrored the larger issue of unresolved national pain lingering from the war era and the treatment and dire circumstances of many of its veterans — raged for almost a year, with veterans, writers, artists, and the public weighing in with their opinions. A compromise was finally reached: a traditional monument would be installed near the entrance of the site to the memorial wall.

The experience made Lin angry and bitter. She detested the publicity and pressure surrounding the situation. After completing the project, she hoped to return to being just another student. She began graduate studies in architecture at Harvard University but then left school to try to recapture her anonymity. She took a position working for an architect in Boston. During this time Lin's disillusionment was turned around by an unexpected development: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial quickly became one of the most highly respected works of art — and the most-visited public monument — in the country.

Demonstrates Gift for Involving Viewers

Lin had created an environment capable of moving visitors to great emotion. Thousands of veterans, surviving family members, and others came to find the names of loved ones and left behind flowers and other mementos. Lin had found a perfect formula for involving people directly in the work and, in the process, had heightened for many the experience of honoring and grieving for the dead. Somehow her efforts had managed to help heal the deep psychic wounds inflicted on America by the Vietnam War. Indeed, so many visitors have touched the wall, many leaving with rubbings of the engraved names, that by 1994 restoration had begun to repair cracks and other wear associated with the constant attention.

In creating her works Lin devotes herself to a serious process of study. For the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, she carefully examined the area in which the wall was to be built, taking into consideration the slope of the land and the adjacent structures. She also investigated the art of other eras and cultures to see how memorials honoring the dead had been conceived throughout history. Moreover, she read the journals of soldiers from World War I.

For her next project, a memorial for the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama, Lin studied the history of the movement and the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was in his writings that she found the inspiration for this monument: one of King's favorite phrases from the Bible, which he used in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. King insisted that seekers of equality would not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." The image of water rolling down inspired Lin.

Water Rolls in Montgomery

The design for this monument, which was dedicated in 1989, was a large, solid granite disk engraved with the names and events of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Behind the disk is a nine-foot granite wall inscribed with the quotation from King. Both pieces are covered with a thin veil of constantly running water. Visitors are attracted to the water, through which they can trace the inscriptions with their fingers. Lin explained, "I'm trying to make people become involved with the piece on all levels, with the touch and sound of the water, with the words, with the memories." The Montgomery monument has been praised for capturing "the essence of a moment of history with simple forms that evoke the widest range of emotions."

In 1989 Lin decided she would no longer create monuments, since that was becoming the only thing she was associated with and she wanted to do other things. Consequently, during the 1990s she was involved with many projects, including eight public commissions. She renovated two floors of a building in New York City for a new Museum of African Art. She designed several private residences. A great honor came Lin's way when she was asked by Yale to create a sculpture to commemorate women at the university. She designed a three-foot-high table of green granite. A funnel-shaped hole in the table allows water to seep through. On top is a spiral of numbers, which begin with zero and run into the thousands, indicating the number of women who have attended Yale over the years. The Women's Table stands in front of the university's Sterling Memorial Library.

Works Show Concern for Environment

In 1993 Lin created a sculptural landscape work called Groundswell at Ohio State University — a three-level garden of crushed green glass. For this project, Lin directed a crew of six as 40 tons of recycled glass were hoisted by a crane into a cone-shaped sifter. The glass was "poured" into soft mounds to create a wave effect. Like this one, many of Lin's works reveal her concern with the environment. She often uses stone, water, earth, and, as in Groundswell, recycled materials. This work has received some criticism, and a vandal poured red paint onto a portion of the glass, forcing Lin to replace 14 tons of it. Lin has not become immune to the controversies her work continues to inspire. "I've learned to expect criticism," she told the New York Times, "but it still hurts."

In 1994 Lin designed a 14-foot-long clock for New York's Pennsylvania Station. It is made of translucent glass, lighted by hundreds of fiber optic light points. According to Newsweek, it hovers above the heads of travelers "like a glowing flying saucer." In 1995 the University of Michigan dedicated Lin's pure earth sculpture, The Wave Field, commissioned by the François-Xavier Bagnoud Foundation. Lin also worked on a downtown rejuvenation project in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and created an installation piece for the Cleveland Public Library and a sculpture for NYC's Rockefeller Foundation. In 1998 she came out with a new line of furniture for Knoll called "the earth is (not) flat."

Subject of Academy Award-Winning Documentary

In 1995 a documentary about Maya Lin called Maya Lin: A Strong, Clear Vision made by filmmaker Freida Lee Mock won the Academy Award. The film follows Lin's career from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with all its controversy, through her civil rights and women's monuments and then returns to the Vietnam memorial for its tenth anniversary attended by 10,000 Vietnam veterans. Depicting the life and vision of an artist working in a political world, the film — and its subject — received rave reviews. Film critic Gene Siskel noted: "It brought tears to my eyes ... Maya Lin is a great artist and this film captures her talent and courage. I can't wait to show it to my daughters, because Maya Lin, I hope, will be a role model for them."

Lin devotes considerable time to overseeing the many details and finishing touches of each of her works. When not on-site, she works in an office, a nondescript room in an old building in New York, or in a house she owns in Vermont, where she creates her abstract or nonrepresentational sculptural pieces. Having endured such harsh reactions to her work, Lin stays out of the public eye as much as possible. Still, so much of her work is so public and so innovative that publicity is hard to avoid. Much of the debate centering on her efforts comes from the difficulty people have in categorizing them as architecture or sculpture. Lin has seemed to take advantage of this confusion as she continues to create the unexpected in hope that she will further involve and move those who view her work.

Most recently, Lin has written a book, Boundaries (Simon & Schuster, 2000), and created a sculpture for the new Minneapolis Client Service Center (March 12, 2002).

To view some of Maya Lin's works on the Internet, go to Artcyclopedia.

Source: DISCovering Biography on GaleNet.
Site updated 2003.