Maya Lin

by Diana B.S.


Maya Lin is one of the most respected artists of our time. She is well known for her design at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. "I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then polished, like a geode. Interest in the land and concern about how we are polluting the air and water of the planet are what make me want to travel back in geologic time-to witness the shaping of the earth before man." Lin said in one of her interviews. In her senior year at Yale University, Lin was chosen to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. She made a black V shaped wall for about 58,000 names to be inscribed on it. The Veterans were outraged. They wanted a traditional white marble wall. The memorial eventually put one at the entrance of the park. While at Yale Lin was asked to take an architecture or sculpture class but not both. Lin could not pick one or the other so she chose architecture and secretly went to other sculpture classes. Lin was also chosen to construct a memorial for 9/11 at Ground Zero. "I thought about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it." Lin said while building the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Lin now lives in New York with her husband Daniel Wolf, and their two young children. Maya Lin was born in 1959 in Athens, Ohio.