Biography Center Themes Maya Lin "I work with the landscape, and I hope that the object and the land are equal partners."
One of the rare few who has managed to forge a path in both art and architecture, Maya Lin is a sculptor, architect, designer, and craftswoman. Lin has consciously resisted divisions between architecture and design or fine and applied art. Lin's parents are originally from Beijing and Shanghai but moved to Athens, Ohio in 1949. Her mother taught literature and her father taught art at Ohio University, Lin who grew up surrounded by art and literature was constantly delving into new projects and books. She credits her Asian-American heritage as the source of her refusal to separate East/West influences, reason and intuition, and left and right brain. Lin attended Yale University, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Architecture in 1981, and a Master of Architecture from Yale's School of Architecture in 1986. The following year, she opened a studio where she could complete art and architecture projects designed for locations throughout the country. Influenced by the Earth Artists of the 60's and 70's, 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. She has continuously addressed the notion of landscape and topology in her work. She refers to the Women's Table (Yale University, 1993) and the Civil Rights Memorial (Southern Poverty Law Center, Montgomery, Alabama 1988-1993) as water tables-with the water and the historical information they offer, welling up as if from the earth itself. One of the primary images she had for the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial (The Mall, Washington, D. C., 1981) was tearing at the earth. | |
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