sff_corgi_lj | Women's History Month 2004

Maya Ying Lin Walking through this park-like area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth -- a long, polished black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward, and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into the grassy site contained by the walls of this memorial, we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial's walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole... So begins the competition entry submitted in 1981 by a Yale undergraduate for the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. -- subsequently called "as moving and awesome and popular a piece of memorial architecture as exists anywhere in the world." ¹ At the tender age of 21, Maya Lin ² -- sculptor, architect, designer, and craftswoman ³ -- 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. ²
Maya Ying Lin, born Oct 5 1959, 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,² originally from Beijing and Shanghai ³. Early on Lin displayed a talent for mathematics and art; ² she grew up surrounded by art and literature was constantly delving into new projects and books. She credits her Asian-American heritage as the source of her refusal to separate East/West influences, reason and intuition, and left and right brain. ³ She has also written that the surrounding wooded hills where she played as a child, and the local Native American burial mounds, all had a " profound influence" on her work. ⁴
	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. ² She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Architecture in 1981, and a Master of Architecture from Yale's School of Architecture in 1986. The following year, she opened a studio where she could complete art and architecture projects designed for locations throughout the country. ³ 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. A panel of distinguished judges 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.
Soon after Lin's concept -- she was still just a senior architecture student at Yale -- 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. Lin had created an environment capable of moving visitors to great emotion. 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 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 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. 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."
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, her alma mater, 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.
	In 1992-93 Lin was artist in residence at the Wexner Center at Ohio State University. A major landscape project that she carried out there was Groundswell, which involved creating wave-like forms in some of the Wexner Center's visible (but inaccessible to the public) interstitial spaces with 43 tons of recycled, shattered automobile safety glass. Lin has written of Groundswell that "the piece is a conscious effort on my part to combine my Eastern and Western cultural heritage-namely, mixing my affinity for the southeastern Ohio terrain and its regional burial mounds with my love for the raked-sand gardens of Japan."[9] It was also significant because it was Lin's first major work using methods and materials that previously she had reserved for small studio works that she had created purely for her own purposes-to explore aesthetic issues and experiment with certain materials. ⁴ For this project, Lin directed a crew of six as the 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." ²
In 1994 Lin designed a 14-foot-long clock ( 'Eclipsed Time') 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 Headquarters. In 1998 she came out with a new line of furniture for Knoll called "the earth is (not) flat."
	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. 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. 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. ²
Her concerns about the environment led her to serve on the Board of Energy Foundation as well as on the National Advisory Board to the Presidio Council in San Francisco. Recently, Lin began collaborating with The Natural Resources Defense Council and Banana Kelly to design a paper recycling center for the South Bronx in New York. She also serves on the Boards of The Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance project, the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University, and Studio in a School in New York. This work comes from her firm support of education and the arts. ³ Her many awards include the architecture prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for designing buildings like the Langston Hughes Library (Clinton, Tennessee, 1999) and the Museum for African Art (SoHo, New York, 1984-92). She has also received the Presidential Design Award, The American Institute of Architects Honor Award, and the Henry Bacon Memorial Award; and Honorary Doctorates in Fine Arts from Harvard, Yale, Brown, Smith, and Williams.
	Lin lives in New York with her husband Daniel Wolf, and their two young children. ³ Most recently, Lin has written a book, Boundaries (Simon & Schuster, 2000) and created a sculpture/garden for American Express's new Minneapolis Client Service Center (March 12, 2002). ² "I work with the landscape, and I hope that the object and the land are equal partners." ³ ¹ http://www.featuredbooks.com/maya_ying_lin.htm ² http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/whm/bio/lin_m.htm ³ http://www.nwhp.org/tlp/biographies/lin/lin_bio.html ⁴ http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/ http://womensearlyart.net/lin/