| Maya Lin | |
 |
|
| Born | October 5, 1959 Athens, Ohio |
| Nationality | United States |
| Field | sculpture |
| Training | Yale University |
| Works | Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Civil Rights Memorial |
Maya Ying Lin (traditional Chinese: 林瓔; simplified Chinese: 林璎; pinyin: Lín Yīng; born October 5, 1959) is an American artist who has become known for her work in sculpture and landscape art. Her best-known work is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Contents |
Early life
Lin was born in Athens, Ohio, daughter of Henry Huan Lin, a ceramist and former Dean of the Ohio University College of Fine Arts, and Julia Chang Lin, formerly Professor of Literature at Ohio University.1 She is the niece of Lin Huiyin, who is said to be the first female architect in China.
She studied at Yale University (1986). In 1987, Yale conferred upon Lin an honorary Doctorate Degree in Fine Arts. She is married to Daniel Wolf, a New York photography dealer. They have two daughters: Rachel Wolf and India Wolf.23
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
In 1981, at age 21 and while still an undergraduate, she won a public design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The black cut-stone masonry wall, with the names of fallen soldiers carved into its face as requested by the families of the casualties, officially opened to the public on November 13, 1982. The wall is granite and V-shaped, with one side pointing to the Lincoln Memorial and the other to the Washington Monument. Lin's conception was to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the gravity of the loss of the soldiers. The design was originally controversial but has since been much acclaimed and is visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. It has also become an important pilgrimage site for relatives and friends of the American military casualties in Vietnam, and personal tokens and mementos are left at the wall daily in their memory.45
Lin believes that if the competition had not been "blind", with designs submitted by number instead of name, she "never would have won." Some groups criticized the memorial because of its non-traditional design, but Lin successfully defended her design in front of the United States Congress. Eventually a compromise was reached and a bronze statue of a group of soldiers and an American flag was placed off to one side of the monument.3
Work after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Lin, who now owns and operates Maya Lin Studio in New York City, went on to design other structures, including the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (1989) and the Wave Field at the University of Michigan (1995).6
In 1994, she was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. The title comes from an address she gave at Yale where she speaks of the monument design process.
In 2000, Lin re-emerged in public life with a book Boundaries.7 Also in 2000, she agreed to act as the artist and architect for the Confluence Project, a series of outdoor installations at historical points along the Columbia River and Snake River in the state of Washington. This is the largest and longest project that she has undertaken so far.8
In 2002, Lin was elected Alumni Fellow of the Yale Corporation, the governing body of Yale University (Upon whose campus sits another of Lin's designs: the Women's Table - designed to commemorate the role of women at Yale University.), in an unusually public contest. Her opponent was W. David Lee, a local New Haven minister and graduate of the Yale Divinity School who was running on a platform to build ties to the community with the support of Yale's unionized employees. Lin was supported by Yale's President Richard Levin, other members of the Yale Corporation, and was the officially endorsed candidate of the Association of Yale Alumni.
In 2003, Lin served on the selection jury of the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. A trend toward minimalism and abstraction was noted among the entrants, finalists, and current World Trade Center Memorial.
In 2005, Lin was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.
Lin was commissioned by Ohio University to design what is known as punch card park, a landscape literally designed to resemble a punch card, supposedly based on Lin's memories of their early use in universities. The park is a large open space with rectangular mounds and voids on the ground.photo At first the park was criticized for being relatively uninviting (with punchcard pits promoting mosquito infestation and preventing safe active recreation) and lacked trees or structures to shade students from the sun. In addition, from the ground level, it is difficult to tell what the park is supposed to look like, though from an aerial view it does resemble a punch card. Although the university since planted trees around the park's perimeter in an attempt to make it a more popular place for students to gather, this has been unsuccessful.910
In 2008, Lin completed a 30-ton sculpture called "2 x 4 Landscape," which is on exhibit at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, California.11 Her current projects include an installation at the Storm King Art Center.12
Bibliography
- Maya Lin: Topologies (Artist and the community) (1998) ISBN 1888826053
- Maya Lin: [American Academy in Rome, 10 dicembre 1998-21 febbraio 1999] (1998) ISBN 8843568329
- Timetable: Maya Lin (2000) ASIN B000PT331Y (2002, ISBN 0937031194)
- Boundaries (2000) ISBN 0684834170 (2006, ISBN 0743299590)
References
- ^ http://ohiobio.org/lin.htm
- ^ Maya Lin
- ^ a b Maya Lin emerges from the shadows
- ^ Gale - Free Resources - Women's History - Biographies - Maya Lin
- ^ Maya Lin - Great Buildings Online
- ^ Art:21 . Maya Lin's "Wave Field" PBS
- ^ Maya Lin emerges from the shadows
- ^ "A Meeting Of Minds", The Seattle Times (2005-06-12). Retrieved on 7 September 2006.
- ^ The Athens NEWS | Money spent on new OU park could have been better spent
- ^ Maya Lin's Bicentennial Park at Ohio University in Athens Ohio - IBM Punch Card Art is no Vietnam Veterans Memorial
- ^ Maya Lin looks at nature - from the inside
- ^ "Once Inspired by a War, Now by the Land", New York Times (November 7, 2008). Retrieved on 9 November 2008. "On a gray, unusually muggy October day the artist and architect Maya Lin was showing a visitor around “Wave Field,” her new earthwork project at the Storm King Art Center here. The 11-acre installation, which will open to the public next spring, consists of seven rows of undulating hills cradled in a gently sloping valley."
External links
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Maya Lin |
- Mayalin.com, Main site for Maya Lin Studio.
- Biography, interviews, essays, artwork images and video clips from PBS series Art:21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 1 (2001).
- Peace Chapel at Juniata College in Huntingdon, PA
- Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision (1994) at the Internet Movie Database
- Maya Lin's Earth Day Message of Hope on Earth Day 2006 at The Nature Conservancy
- Confluence Project located at sites in both Washington and Oregon
- Thompson Gale Publishers, Review of her work.
- Maya Lin's public artwork at Penn Station, commissioned by MTA Arts for Transit.
- Maya Lin on Universal Loss and Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Fora.tv
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 23 November 2008, at 00:33.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by PediaView.com. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with PediaView.com.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Maya Lin".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.