Rough Sketches: Featured Artist: Maya Lin

At 21 years old, Maya Lin’s entry won the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s design contest, launching her into a career as one of the most important current public artists with works ranging from large-scale, site-specific installations, to intimate studio artworks, architectural works, and memorials.

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Peace Chapel, Juniata College, 1988-89

Landscape is the focus of much of Lin's art, merging the technological advancement and style of modern day life with ideas of natural beauty. “Her works address how we relate and respond to the environment, and presents new ways of looking at the world around us” (http://www.mayalin.com/). Some of her pieces are partially or fully embedded in the earth, merging completely with the environment, blurring the boundaries between the natural and the synthetic.

Eleven Minute Line, Earth and Grass, 2004

An example of such works is The Wavefield at University of Michigan, which consists of tall, undulating waves made entirely of soil and grass, and the Vietnam Memorial, a V-shaped wall of black stone, sunken into the earth, etched with the names of 58,000 dead soldiers.

Wave Field, Earth and grass, 1995

Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Stone, 1982

Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Stone, 1982

Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Stone, 1982

Her Civil Rights memorial in Montgomery, Alabama displays inscriptions on a disc of black stone beneath a thin layer of moving water. On the disc are names of people who died in the name of civil rights and the dates of important events in civil rights’ history. Lin describes the piece in her book, Boundaries: “In choosing to intertwine events with people's deaths, I was trying to illustrate the cause-and-effect relationship between them. The struggle for civil rights in this country was a people's movement, and a walk around the table reveals how often the act of a single person -- often enough, a single death -- was followed by a new and better law.”