The Bell Tower, Shantou University, Guangdong, China Artist: Unidentified Artist Photograph Shantou University, courtesy Maya Lin Studio
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Portrait of a Visionary: Maya Lin BY ARI POS T There aren’t many artists in the last 50 years who will have more impact on the world than Maya Lin. I’m not talking about the “art world” — that ill-defined stratosphere increasingly controlled by jacked up billionaires and their dealers — but the real, lived-in world of regular people. People who go on hikes, who visit crowded cultural landmarks on vacation, who have children, who have lost loved ones, who are concerned about the future and who carry hope with them anyway. That may seem hyperbolic, but I’m willing to bet time will bear me out. Opening on Sept. 30 at the National Portrait Gallery, “One Life: Maya Lin” is an intimate exhibition tracing Lin’s life from childhood to the present. In consultation with the artist herself, this latest edition of the museum’s “One Life” series will bring together an assortment of Lin’s sculptures, sketchbooks and creative material, as well as family photographs and personal ephemera, to offer insight into Lin’s artistic process and remarkable career. “This is not a retrospective,” says exhibition curator Dorothy Moss. “It doesn’t represent the breadth of her work. But we hope that audiences will walk away with
an understanding of how this influential artist, architect and environmental activist approaches her work, what shaped her vision as a young person and how she’s been able to hold onto that vision throughout her career.” Lin was hurled into the public eye in 1981 when her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was selected through a nationwide competition and became a subject of national controversy. The design was an unadorned wall of black stone, sunken below ground level in a V-shaped trench. There were no pictures, no sculptures, nothing physically representative of the war itself. Just the names, etched in the stone, of the 58,318 servicemen and women who lost their lives during the war. Objectors called it “a black gash of shame and sorrow,” “a nihilistic slab of stone.” At one point the project’s building permit was delayed due to the political opposition. Issues were ultimately worked out — in part by the addition of a bronze sculpture by Frederick Hart featuring three young soldiers (which, as far as these things go, is not bad) — and Lin’s design was left more or less intact. At the time this was all happening, Lin was a 20-year-old undergraduate studying
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architecture at Yale. She is also of Asian descent, which drew obscene amounts of attention to the issue, even if it was rarely referenced directly. (Lin is Chinese, not Vietnamese, but as Korean American choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess says, “People don’t often understand the diversity and complexity of our Asian American community — especially back then.”) Today, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall is the most visited war memorial in Washington — and in many ways the most beloved. While some of that is the straightforward stuff of how many people touched by that war are still around today to visit the memorial (and to drag their families along with them), a lot of it also has to do with the quiet power and
starkly overwhelming beauty of the memorial experience in itself. As Lin’s career progressed, so did the alarm around climate change and the need for environmental activism. Last year, she created one of the most powerful art installations ever to address climate change. “Ghost Forest” was a towering stand of 49 dead cedar trees in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park, erected to raise awareness of ecosystem die-off. “One Life: Maya Lin” will surely offer audiences a new way of understanding the artist herself. VISIT GEORGETOWNER.COM FOR THE FULL ARTICLE
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Maya Lin working on ‘Pin River - Hudson’ Artist: Chester Higgins Jr. Photograph: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times/Redux 22 SEPTEMBER 14, 2022
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