
Maya Lin has maintained a careful balance in her career between art and architecture, creating a remarkable body of work that includes large-scale site-specific installations, intimate studio artworks, and architectural works.
In her large-scale environmental artworks she has consistently explored how we experience and relate to the landscape. From her recent works—such as Where the Land Meets the Sea (2008, a drawing in space based upon the topology of the San Francisco Bay), Eleven Minute Line (2004, an earthen line 1,600 feet long by 12 feet high, traversing a meadow in Sweden), and Flutter (2005, a 20,000-square-foot sculpted earthwork commissioned for a federal courthouse in Miami)—back to her very first—the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, where she cut open the land and polished its edges to create a history embedded in the earth—she has made works that merge completely with the terrain, blurring the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional space and setting up a systematic ordering of the land that is tied to history, time, and language.
Her studio artwork has been shown in solo museum exhibitions in the U.S, Italy, Denmark, and Sweden. The exhibition “Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes,” which opened at Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery and traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 2009, was the first to translate the scale and coherence of her outdoor installations to the interior space of a museum.
Lin’s architectural works have been critically acclaimed both nationally and internationally. Her architecture includes the Riggio-Lynch Chapel (2004) and Langston Hughes Library (1999) at Haley Farm (Clinton, TN) for the Children’s Defense Fund; an Environmental Learning Lab at Manhattanville College in Harrison, NY (2006); and a private residence in Colorado that was honored as one of Architectural Record’s Record Houses in 2006. Lin’s architecture creates a dialogue between the landscape and architecture: she is committed to and advocates sustainable design practice in her works, often using sustainable and reclaimed materials, merging materials and design to establish a singular voice.
In 2009, Maya Lin completed the design for the new space for the Museum of Chinese in America in lower Manhattan, as well as Storm King Wavefield, an eleven-acre earthwork reclamation project at Storm King Art Center (NY). Among her current projects is the Confluence Project, a multi-sited installation that spans the Columbia River system in the Pacific Northwest, intertwining the history of Lewis and Clark with the history of the indigenous Native American peoples, but always with a critical eye toward the environmental changes that have rapidly occurred in the region.
A committed environmentalist, Lin is working on what will be her last memorial, What Is Missing?, again reinventing what a monument can be. What is Missing? focuses on the current crisis surrounding biodiversity and habitat loss. It is a multi-sited work existing in select scientific institutions, online as a website, and as a book. It debuted at the California Academy of Sciences in September 2009 with a sound and media sculpture installation on the Academy’s east terrace. On Earth Day 2010 a video installation was presented in conjunction with Creative Time on the MTV HD screen in Manhattan’s Times Square. The video, presented in one of the most artificial environments in the city, showed colorful high-resolution imagery of endangered animals with text that provoked the viewer to take a moment to consider the global extinction crisis.
Maya Lin received her B.A. from Yale University in 1981, a Master of Architecture degree from Yale School of Architecture in 1986, and has maintained a professional studio in New York City since then. Lin is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the Natural Resources Defense Council and is a member of the Yale Corporation. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Presidential Design Award, an AIA Honor Award, the Finn Juhl Prize, and honorary doctorates from, among other institutions, Yale University, Harvard University, Williams College, and Smith College. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2005 was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She has been profiled in Time magazine, the New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker and her architecture and artworks have consistently elicited praise in magazines ranging from Newsweek to Art in America to Architectural Record. In 1996 a documentary about her work, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. She lives in New York City with her husband, Daniel Wolf, and their two children.
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Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing
Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing
Edited by Michael Merrill
Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
Published: October 2021
The first in-depth study of drawings as primary sources of insight into architect Louis Kahn’s architecture and creative imagination. Based on unprecedented archival research, with over 900 illustrations and written contributions by Michael Benedikt, Michael Cadwell, David Leatherbarrow, Louis Kahn, Nathaniel Kahn, Sue Ann Kahn, Michael J. Lewis, Robert McCarter, Michael Merrill, Marshall Meyers, Jane Murphy, Gina Pollara, Harriet Pattison, Colin Rowe, David Van Zanten, Richard Wesley, and William Whitaker.
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People by Debbie Millman
Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World's Most Creative People
By Debbie Millman
Publisher: Harper Design
Forthcoming: February 22, 2022
Debbie Millman—author, educator, brand consultant, and host of the widely successful and award-winning podcast “Design Matters”—showcases dozens of her most exciting interviews, bringing together insights and reflections from today’s leading creative minds from across diverse fields.
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Design Emergency: Building a Better Future
By Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Forthcoming May 25, 2022
Rawsthorn and Antonelli tell the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes—Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology—the authors present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.
Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn by Harriet Pattison
Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn
By Harriet Pattison
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: October 2020
An intimate glimpse into the professional and romantic relationship between Harriet Pattison and the renowned architect Louis Kahn. Harriet Pattison, FASLA, is a distinguished landscape architect. She was Louis Kahn’s romantic partner from 1959 to 1974, and his collaborator on the landscapes of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, and the F.D.R. Memorial/Four Freedoms Park, New York. She is the mother of their son, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn.
Reading Graphic Design History: Image, Text, and Context by David Raizman
Reading Graphic Design History: Image, Text, and Context
By David Raizman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Published: December 2020
An innovative approach to graphic design that uses a series of key artifacts from the history of print culture in light of their specific historical contexts. It encourages the reader to look carefully and critically at print advertising, illustration, posters, magazine art direction, and typography, often addressing issues of class, race, and gender.
David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian by Rick Poynor
David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian
By Rick Poynor
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: September 2020
A comprehensive overview of the work and legacy of David King (1943–2016), whose fascinating career bridged journalism, graphic design, photography, and collecting. King launched his career at Britain’s Sunday Times Magazine in the 1960s, starting as a designer and later branching out into image-led journalism, blending political activism with his design work.
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