Printable Biography of Maya Lin

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Since she founded her own studio in 1987, Maya Lin’s wide range of monuments, sculptures, buildings, interiors and furniture have been “proposing ways of thinking and imagining that resist categories, genres, and borders,” Michael Brenson, critic. As several of the exhibitions of her work have shown, Lin has consciously resisted divisions between architecture and design or fine and applied art.

From the undulating earthwork, The Wave Field (University of Michigan, 1993-94) to the curvilinear roof of the Weber Residence (Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1993-94), to the solar eclipse that inspires Eclipsed Time (an aluminum-steel-and-glass clock on the ceiling of New York’s Pennsylvania Station, 1997), the natural landscape is central to Lin’s work.

Influenced by the Earth Artists of the 60s and 70s, Lin brings a highly contemporary perspective to the landscape by merging the rational order of high technology with the transcendental and irregular forms of nature. With computer-enhanced imaging, aerial and satellite photography, topographic mapping and the principles of fluid dynamics, Lin molded a field of grass into a land sculpture called The Wave Field (University of Michigan, 1993-94). In just one year, Lin explored the relationship of the natural and the manmade in projects as distinct as her sculpture exhibition Topologies (originated by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1998-99), and a commercial furniture line for Knoll inspired by the geometry of the earth (The Earth is (Not) Flat, 1999).

Maya Lin’s artwork is represented by the Gagosian Gallery and has been exhibited all over the country. Maya Lin: Public/Private (Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 1994) drew attention to Lin’s talent in the two distinct domains of art and architecture. Maya Lin, at the American Academy in Rome (1998-1999) where she was an artist in residence, was the first exhibition of Lin’s work outside the United States. The exhibition Topologies exhibited the first of Lin’s sculptures to be designed not for a specific site but for traveling to five additional museums in the United States. It drew attention to Lin’s “gift for extracting metaphorical resonance from the least glamorous natural and industrial materials,” (Holland Carter, The New York Times), and inspired Art in America to call her “a legitimate heir to Frank Lloyd Wright.” Lin was one of four artists commissioned for Illusions of Eden: Visions of the American Heartland, an exhibition endorsed by the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, and whose current tour through Europe and America is an official Millennium event of the White House Millennium Council. In Fall 2000, an exhibition titled Maya Lin: Between Art and Architecture opened at the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery at New York’s Cooper Union, where Lin was the Robert Gwathmey Chair in Art and Architecture.

Lin’s monuments, including The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial (The Mall, Washington, DC, 1982), which won the largest design competition in American history, The Civil Rights Memorial (Southern Poverty Law Center, Montgomery, Alabama, 1988-93), and The Women’s Table (Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1993), have been highly acclaimed for creating an intensely private experience within the most public context. Their intimate human scale invites individuals of all backgrounds to touch, to feel, to respond and to contemplate.

Her architectural work, from the Langston Hughes Library (for the Children’s Defense Fund, Clinton, Tennessee, 1999), to the Museum for African Art (SoHo, New York, 1984-1992), to private residences, have won numerous awards including the Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and have elicited praise from critics including Paul Goldberger (The New Yorker), and Herbert Muschamp (The New York Times).

Lin’s strong concern for environmental issues has lead her to use recycled, living, or natural materials in her work and to focus on sustainable and site-sensitive design solutions. This concern has also led her to serve on the Board of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Energy Foundation, and on the National Advisory Board to the Presidio Council in San Francisco, where she has advocated making the Presidio into a global center for the environment. In her book, Boundaries, Lin introduces a proposal for The Extinction Project, a memorial about biodiversity, the extinction of species, and the relationship of man to the environment.

While Lin has created many socially motivated works of art, she is intent on avoiding didacticism and politics. She is known for presenting facts and allowing viewers to make their own conclusions, making people aware of their surroundings - physical and psychological. She says she “creates places in which to think without dictating what to think.”

Lin’s current works in progress include an interpretive artwork for Yellowstone National Park at the site of Old Faithful which is linked to her Extinction Project, a three-acre park for the Frey Foundation in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan as part of an urban revitalization project, a winter garden for the American Express Headquarters in Minneapolis, a bakery for the Greyston Foundation in Yonkers, New York and a chapel for the Children’s Defense Fund in Clinton, Tennessee.

Lin was born and raised in Athens, Ohio (1959), where her parents, both professors at Ohio University, emigrated from China just before the Communist takeover in 1949. She sees her Asian-American heritage as the source of her refusal to separate East/West influences, reason and intuition, and the left and right brain. In Groundswell (Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, Columbus, 1993), which consists of 43 tons of recycled broken car glass poured into three areas, Lin takes her cues from both Japanese Zen gardens and the earthen mounds of the Hopewell and Adena Indians of her childhood home in southeastern Ohio. A Chinese puzzle box inspired her design for a New York apartment, The Norton Residence (1998).

Lin’s life and work were detailed in the Academy Award-winning documentary film, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision (1995). She lives in New York with her husband, Daniel Wolf, and their two young children.