1. Maya Lin
Artist and Architect

2. Maya’s Life
Maya was born in Ohio in 1960 to Chinese Immigrants.
She received a Bachelor of
Arts in 1981 from Yale.
In 1986, she received a Masters
of Architecture, also from Yale.
She was awarded Honorary
doctorates from Harvard, Williams
College and Smith College.
Brn in

3. Maya’s Times
In 1981, in her senior year at Yale, Maya won a public competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
In 1989, she was invited to design
the Civil Rights Memorial in
Montgomery, Alabama.
In 1993, she designed the
Women’s Table at Yale University.

4. Maya’s Accomplishments
In 2000, Maya published her first book Boundaries.
In 1996, a documentary about her work, Maya Lin:
A Strong and Clear Vision won the Academy Award
For Best Documentary.
In 2003, Maya served on the selection jury of the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition.
In 2005, Maya was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Also in 2005, she was inducted into the
National Women’s Hall of Fame.

5. Maya’s Words
“The process I go through in
art and architecture, I actually
want it to be almost
childlike.”
“The only thing that mattered [in my family] was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching or learning.”
“You should be having
more fun in…school.
You should be exploring
things because you want
to explore them and
learning because you love learning…”
“In all my work I have tried to create works that present you with information allowing you the chance to come to your own conclusions; they ask you to think.”

6. Maya’s Work
Maya has maintained a careful balance between art and architecture throughout her career, creating a remarkable body of work that includes large-scale site-specific installations, intimate artworks, architectural works and memorials.

7. Maya’s Inspiration
Both landscape and the environment have greatly influenced and inspired Maya throughout her career and can be seen in all of her works.

8. Maya’s Memorials The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
In 1981, Maya won an open competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, beating out over 1,400 other applicants.
The black-cut masonry wall had the names of 58,253 fallen soldiers carved into its face.
The wall is granite and V-shaped, with one side pointing to the Lincoln Memorial and the other to the Washington Monument in Washington D.C.
Maya’s conception was to create an opening or wound in the earth to symbolize the gravity of the loss of the soldiers.
The design was controversial because it was unconventional and non-traditional.

9. Maya’s Memorials The Civil Rights Memorial
The Civil Rights Memorial is a stone water table that intertwines historical events of the civil rights era with the names of the people who were killed during that time.
The water table is made of black granite, inscribed with historical events from 1954 to 1968.
The table is accompanied by a 10 foot high water wall, inscribed with a quote by Martin Luther King Jr., “We are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied ‘until justice rolls down like and water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

10. Maya’s Installations Systematic Landscapes
This exhibition showed how Maya continues to explore landscape as both form and content.

11. Maya’s Installations Storm King Wave Field
The Wavefield encompasses an eleven-acre site, with the earthwork covering four acres at the Storm King Art Center.
The Wavefield is comprised
of seven rows of undulating,
rolling waves of earth and
grass.
The waves range in height
from ten to fifteen feet.

12. Maya’s Architecture The Riggio-Lynch Chapel
The Chapel was designed for the Children’s Defense Fund.
The heart of the design of the Chapel is
the abstracted image of a boat or ark.

13. Maya’s Architecture The Box-House
This 4,000 square foot residence evolved out of a desire to create the simplest of forms - a wooden box.
The house is in essence
a box within a box.

14. MAYA’S BIG IDEA:
IDENTITY!

15. IDENTITY What is identity? What type of situations impact identity?
How would you define a
person’s identity?
What type of situations
impact identity?
What symbols are
used in defining
identity?
What types of art making
are good for creating works
about identity?

16. Maya on Identity All of Maya’s works possess undercurrents
“As the child of immigrants you have that sense of, Where are you? Where’s home? And trying to make a home…”
All of Maya’s works
possess undercurrents
of personal associations
and she often uses her
identity as a focal point.
“I think what makes art valuable is:
it is about an individual expressing
what they think is a part of them,
and variety and difference and
clashes is what makes art valuable,
that there is no one defining idea of
what art is or what it should do.
And that's what makes it art,
that it has no rules, that it's so
individualized in that sense.”

17. Maya’s Other Big Ideas Consumption Ecology Structures Memory Place
Time
Stories

18. Bibliography http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/lin/index.html