Maya Lin

(Off View)

Maya Lin is known for her large-scale environmental artworks, her architectural designs, and her memorial designs. She rose to prominence in 1981 when, still an undergraduate student at Yale University, she submitted the winning design in a national competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to be built in Washington, D.C. She has gone on to have significant careers in both art and architecture, including memorial works that focus on some of the critical historical issues of our time. 

Lin’s practice examines how humans experience and relate to the landscape, and its systemic ties to civilization, memory, time, and language. She cites the earthworks of the Land Art movement of the 1970s among her significant influences. In 1994, she began a series of works utilizing wave forms, the first of which was Groundswell (Columbus) , followed by II Cortile Mare (Milan) and later The Wave Field (Ann Arbor) , The Storm King Wave Field (New York) and most recently, Courtyard Sea (Milwaukee) in 2022. 

Exhibitions of Lin’s work have been held at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach; theSmith College Museum of Art, Northampton; and the Madison Square park Conservancy, New York among many others. In 2016, Lin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’s highest civilian honor.