Maya Lin

Today we honor Maya Lin (b.1959) an American architect and sculptor concerned with environmental themes. Lin is best known for her design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. During her senior year at Yale University, she entered a nationwide competition sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to create a design for a monument honoring those who had served and died in that war. 

At age 21, Lin would become an artist to watch when her design took first prize in the contest and the monument she designed was slated to be built at the northwest corner of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The design she submitted was in sharp contrast to traditional war memorials: It was a polished, V-shaped granite wall, with each side measuring 247 feet, simply inscribed with the names of the more than 58,000 soldiers killed or missing in action, listed in order of death or disappearance. 

Maya Lin, The Women’s Table, 1993; Yale University, New Haven, CT. Photographed by Norman McGrath

The monument was graceful and abstract, built to be slightly below ground level, and it eschewed the usual heroic design often associated with such memorials. This, of course, made the work controversial. During the reveal of her design, a group of Vietnam veterans loudly objected to virtually all of its key traits, referring to it ungenerously as the "black gash of shame.” In the end, after much nationwide debate that reached citizens and politicians alike, three realistic figures of soldiers, along with an American flag mounted atop a 60-foot pole, were placed near the monument — close enough to be a part of it but far enough away to preserve Lin’s artistic vision.

After this draining experience for Lin, the monument was opened to the public on Veterans Day, November 11, 1982. Since then it has become a massive, and emotional, draw for tourists, with more than 10,000 people per day viewing the work. It has been noted that its polished surface reflects the viewer’s image, making each visitor one with the monument; Lin wrote, "I like to think of my work as creating a private conversation with each person, no matter how public each work is and no matter how many people are present.”

Maya Lin, Wave Field, 1995; Earth, Grass; Earthwork North Campus; Courtyard, SE side of Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Building at the University of Michigan. Photo from University of Michigan Arts & Culture website.

Lin returned to academic life, to pursue graduate studies in architecture at Harvard University. She left Harvard soon after, though, to work for an architect in Boston, and in 1986 she finished her master’s in architecture at Yale University. Two years later, Lin signed on with the Southern Poverty Law Center to design a monument to the civil rights movement. Again she turned to the power of simplicity in her design. The monument consisted of just two elements: a curved black granite wall inscribed with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and a 12-foot disk inscribed with the dates of major civil rights-era events and the names of 40 martyrs to the cause. Punctuated with a flowing-water element, the memorial was dedicated in Montgomery, Alabama, in November 1989.

In an attempt to avoid being typecast as a builder of memorials, Lin shifted her attention to other forms of art and architecture. Many of her artworks, from small sculptures displayed in galleries to large environmental installations, took their inspiration from the natural features and landscape of Earth. 

In 1993 when she created The Women’s Table, a monument to commemorate the presence of women at Yale. From there she turned to natural elements more and more, as seen in Ann Arbor’s The Wave Field (1995), Miami’s Flutter (2005), and upstate New York’s Storm King Wavefield (2009), each of which found Lin transforming grassy landscapes into vistas resembling ocean waves. Amidst these projects, Lin was commissioned to design a work celebrating the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition (2000). Turning to natural elements once again, Lin created seven art installations along the Columbia River that detailed the historical impact the expedition had on the native peoples and the Pacific Northwest.

Maya Lin, 2 x 4 Landscape, 2006. 70,00 2 x 4 wooden squares assembled into an abstracted hill. © Maya Lin

Lin has also created a topiary park in Charlotte, North Carolina, in collaboration with landscape architect Henry F. Arnold (Topo, 1991), and an installation of 43 tons of shattered automobile safety glass at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (Groundswell, 1993). Groundswell is significant because it was Lin's first major work using methods and materials she previously had reserved for small-scale studio works and experiments.

Lin’s most recent work, Ghost Forest, was unveiled in May 2021.