This Fall, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., has opened a “One Life” exhibition spotlighting architect/designer/sculptor Maya Lin. The Gallery’s Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Dorothy Moss, had first thought of doing a video portrait of Lin, but as she explored her subject, she began to think instead of an exhibit that portrayed Lin’s unique career. Lin’s work has an intriguing hybrid quality that embraces photography, sculpture, liquids, and solids–an approach she defines as “existing on the boundaries–between East and West, public and private.” (Maya Lin to Dorothy Moss)

The result is the exhibit “One Life: Maya Lin.” The earliest section sets the biographical context that forged her career: her parents emigrated from China in the late 1940s– her father was a ceramist who became dean of the Ohio University College of Fine Arts, and her mother is a poet and former professor of literature at Ohio University. Lin was born in 1959, and went on to earn both an undergraduate and master’s degree (in architecture) at Yale.

As a youth, she was intrigued by the Indian burial mounds near her Ohio home, and began thinking about the various relationships people have with their environment. From her childhood, she was always “drawn to landscape,” and her career emerged as a challenge to find “a balance in the landscape, respecting nature and not trying to dominate it.” This became the foundational concept that guided her work—including her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Her vision for the Wall was that it was “an earthwork” that balanced the “tension between the man-made and the natural.”

Lin designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1981, when she was an undergrad at Yale. She had originally created the piece as a sketch for an assignment for Prof. Vincent Scully’s class–even before she knew about the competition for designing the memorial. Scully had asked the class to design a public sculpture that would deal with mortality in a built-structure; when Lin ultimately submitted her design to the competition, it was one of 1,422 submissions. Hers depicted a black granite wall with the names of 57,939 fallen soldiers carved into its face, with one side of its v-shape pointing toward the Lincoln Memorial, and the other toward the Washington Monument.

The Oscar-winning documentary MAYA LIN: A STRONG CLEAR VISION (1995) focused on the enormous culture war her design sparked.  Conservative fireplugs lambasted it as “insulting and depressing–a black scar in a hole.”  The hearings that followed showed opponents were unhappy as well that Lin was young, a woman, and an Asian American. But veterans groups were strong supporters, as was J. Carter Brown, then chairman of the Commission on Fine Arts. A major presence in the art world, Brown’s prestige and influence “ultimately enabled the project to be realized.”  (Neil Harris, CAPITAL CULTURE, p. 359.)

The emotional wounds from the controversy were brutal for the young artist, although over the years she has tried to “pretend the ugliness and racism” never happened. Instead of brooding on the past, she has committed herself to an environmental activism that is the essential passion shaping her career.

Because “landscape” is her priority,  Lin’s work is always site-specific. She sees her outdoor public sculptures as environmental responses that balance architecture and art with a landscape’s site. These ideas are very personal to Lin, and reflect her response to her parents’ vocations in poetry and pottery. When she is creating a sculpture, she is very tactile in molding the work first–a method that recalls her father’s work as a potter. She also acknowledges her mother’s literary influence, as when she describes how architecture is like a novel, with words coming together to convey meaning, while art is like a poem whose form is all about “feeling.” 

When beginning a project, she walks across a landscape to get a sense of how her work could become a part of the natural swirl.  Water is an element that particularly fascinates her, as in her series called “pin rivers.” For these works, she maps out the topography of a river or estuary using stainless steel pins that become sculptural wall reliefs.  She wants viewers to experience a river system as something that is finite, like “a singular organism.” Her study of the Hudson River uses 20,000 pins to depict the water as a “river sculpture” that aims to reveal how humans—and natural disasters like hurricanes–can ravage a river’s existence.

Environmentalism has also shaped her “wave field” installations. The first “wave field” she built was at the University of Michigan–a project that evolved into a 10,000-square-foot patch of grassy waves, each three-to-five feet tall. Recently, New York City commissioned her to design a public structure for Madison Square Park:  the result was “Ghost Forest,” in which Lin used 49 once-vibrant white cedar trees that had succumbed to climate change. She had the life-stripped trees planted in their own Madison Square Park woodscape “forest” that people could walk through for several months in 2021. 

“One Life: Maya Lin” is the first biographical exhibition dedicated to the environmentalist/architect/sculptor. Lin gave curator Dorothy Moss open access to her archives, and the result is a fascinating display of three-dimensional models and sculptures, pastel sketches, and a variety of drawings and photographs that encompass Lin’s career so far. There is also an interactive installation designed by Lin as part of her ongoing commitment to envrionmentalism—“What Is Missing?”  (2012-to-present)–that asks visitors to share their own memories of natural elements that have vanished in their own lifetimes.

 By Amy Henderson, Senior Contributing Editor                                                      

“One Life: Maya Lin” will be at the National Portrait Gallery through April 16, 2023.   npg.si.edu