Maya Lin - Vietnam Memorial wall PDF

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Storia del giornalismo: The Vietnam Memorial Wall – Washington

May Lin was born in Athens, Ohio, daughter of Henry Huan Lin, a ceramist and former Dean of the Ohio University College of Fine Arts, and Julia Chang Lin, formerly Professor of Literature at Ohio University.[1] She is the niece of Lin Huiyin, who is said to be the first female architect in China. She studied at Yale University (1986). In 1987, Yale conferred upon Lin an honorary Doctorate Degree in Fine Arts. She is married to Daniel Wolf, a New York photography dealer. They have two daughters: Rachel Wolf and India Wolf.[2][3] In 1981, at age 21 and while still an undergraduate, she won a public design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The black cut-stone masonry wall, with the names of fallen soldiers carved into its face as requested by the families of the casualties, officially opened to the public on November 13, 1982. The wall is granite and Vshaped, with one side pointing to the Lincoln Memorial and the other to the Washington Monument. Lin's conception was to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the gravity of the loss of the soldiers.

The design was originally controversial but has since been much acclaimed and is visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. It has also become an important pilgrimage site for relatives and friends of the American military casualties in Vietnam, and personal tokens and mementos are daily left at the wall in their memory.[4][5] Lin believes that if the competition had not been "blind", with designs submitted by number instead of name, she "never would have won." Some groups criticised the memorial because of its non-traditional design, but Lin successfully defended her design in front of the United States Congress. Eventually a compromise was reached and a bronze statue of a group of soldiers and an American flag was placed off to one side of the monument.[3] Lin, who now owns and operates Maya Lin Studio in New York City, went on to design other structures, including the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (1989) and the Wave Field at the University of Michigan (1995).[6] In 1994, she was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. The title comes from an address she gave at Yale where she speaks of the monument design process. In 2000, Lin re-emerged in public life with a book Boundaries.[7] Also in 2000, she agreed to act as the artist and architect for the Confluence Project, a series of outdoor installations at historical points along the Columbia River and Snake River in the state of Washington. This is the largest and longest project that she has undertaken so far.[8] In 2002, Lin was elected Alumni Fellow of the Yale Corporation, the governing body of Yale University (Upon whose campus sits another of Lin's designs: the Women's Table - designed to commemorate the role of women at Yale University.), in an unusually public contest. Her opponent was W. David Lee, a local New Haven minister and graduate of the Yale Divinity School who was running on a platform to build ties to the community with the support of Yale's unionized employees. Lin was supported by Yale's President Richard Levin, other members of the Yale Corporation, and was the officially endorsed candidate of the Association of Yale Alumni. In 2003, Lin served on the selection jury of the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. A trend toward minimalism and abstraction was noted among the entrants, finalists, and current World Trade Center Memorial. In 2005, Lin was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. Lin was commissioned by Ohio University to design what is known as punch card park, a landscape literally designed to resemble a punch card, supposedly based on Lin's memories of their early use in universities. The park is a large open space with rectangular mounds and voids on the ground.photo At first the park was criticized for being relatively uninviting (with punchcard pits promoting mosquito infestation and preventing safe active recreation) and lacked trees or structures to shade students from the sun. In addition, from the ground level, it is difficult to tell what the park is supposed to look like, though from an aerial view it does resemble a punch card. Although the university since planted trees around the park's perimeter in an attempt to make it a more popular place for students to gather, this has been unsuccessful.[9][10] In 2008, Lin completed a 30-ton sculpture called "2 x 4 Landscape," which is on exhibit at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, California.

Maya Lin emerges from the shadows The artist who created the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is out with a book and a more outspoken profile Thursday, October 19, 2000

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By REGINA HACKETT SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER ART CRITIC When Frieda Mock and Terry Saunders won an Academy Award for their 1995 documentary, "Maya Lin: A Strong, Clear Vision," nobody was more surprised than Lin's closest friends. "They didn't know till they saw me on TV," she says with a guilty, self-effacing grin. "I told almost nobody that filmmakers were following me around for five years. Once I failed to mention it, the time to mention it never came. I felt as if I were leading a double life." Only those who have something important to hide lead double lives. What Lin was hiding makes her new book, "Boundaries," a personal breakthrough. After 20 years of glossing it over, she's finally willing to admit that she's famous, exactly the sort of artist who interests not only a film crew but a nation. Photo After 20 years of downplaying her celebrity, Maya Lin finally admits that she is of interest to a nation in her new book. Grant M. Haller/P-I As a senior studying at Yale's school of architecture, 20-year-old Lin created the design for what has proved to be the single most successful piece of public sculpture in the country: the 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Lin was in Seattle on Tuesday as part of a quick reading tour in support of the book. She's on tour for a week, which is the longest she's willing to be away from her husband, photography dealer Daniel Wolf, and their two young daughters in New York City. "I've always been seen through the eyes of others," she says, sliding gracefully into an overstuffed chair at the restaurant at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel. "I thought it was time to speak for myself." Although she had been awake since 5 a.m. in order to catch Wolf and her daughters before they started their day, her eyes were clear and her manner lively. At 41, she has a fresh, delicate beauty that belies her age. She could still be the youngster who patiently defended her design against waves of impassioned attackers, except that she has matured into a strong angularity and a clear confidence. If she were defending her work before Senate committees today, her voice wouldn't tremble and she wouldn't hide her face under the rim of an enormous hat. She made her first model for the Veterans Memorial out of mashed potatoes in the Yale dining hall. Earlier that week she had seen the site in Washington and immediately envisioned a form cutting into the earth. The veterans sponsoring the memorial had asked only that the names of the 57,000 Americans killed in the war be carved into the memorial's face. Lin's great vision was a polished black granite wedge that rises on an angle out of the earth, not a wall exactly but an edge to the earth opened up, a landscape created by the gravity of enormous loss. Seeking out names of loved ones, viewers see themselves mirrored there. If the competition hadn't been a blind one, in which designs were submitted by number instead of name, "I never would have won," she says. Some vets saw the design as insulting and wanted the granite to be white and entirely above ground, accompanied by a giant American flag. "I would have taken my name off it," she says smiling, aware of how little that would have mattered at the time.

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Finally, a compromise plan emerged, with a conventional grouping of bronze figures made to share the site. "Some people wanted the figures in front of the monument," she says, which would have turned it into a backdrop." Instead, the figures are off to the side, where they have proved irrelevant to all but a few. "When it was over, I wanted to pretend it never happened," she says. "I went back to school and tried to forget it. I refused to talk about the memorial or do another one." The name of fallen heroes are etched into Lin's civil rights memorial located in Montgomery, Ala. AP photo In 1988, she made an exception to her rule and agreed to design the "Civil Rights Memorial" at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. "There was no civil rights memorial," she says. "That's what interested me, the chance to provide a focal point for thinking about that crucial time in our history." Her inspiration for the piece came from the image of water Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. evoked in his "I Have a Dream Speech," that "We are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Approaching her finished piece, few people focus on the 14 tons of stone used to make what amounts to a giant, rounded table top. Instead, they see the words floating under a thin scrim of moving water on the stone's surface, a circular timeline beginning in 1954 with the Supreme Court decision to integrate American schools (Brown vs. the Board of Education) and ending with Dr. King's murder in 1968. Trailing a finger across the letters breaks into the water's stream and makes the viewer a physical part of the history he or she is exploring. At the dedication, Julian Bond praised it as a "monument majestic in its simplicity and overwhelming in its power." On these two memorials, Lin's fame rests, at least outside the art world. Some people wonder if starting her career with a big bang at an early age didn't stop that career as well. The truth is, Lin never stopped producing as both as artist and an architect, but the quiet, reductive clarity of her work doesn't seize the public's attention when a large social issue isn't at stake. That's the reason she has avoided those large social issues whenever possible. In a celebrity- besotted culture, Lin's decision to avoid the limelight might seem odd, but only to those who haven't seen "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision" and don't know what the limelight cost her. "Boundaries" beautifully describes the range of her production, from hilly mounds of broken glass at Ohio State University ("Groundswell," 1992-93) to the grassy swell of burial mounds at the University of Michigan ("Wave Field," 1993-95) and her radical subversion of a corporate building's lobby in Des Moines ("A Shift in the Stream," 1995-1997). She has designed houses, most notably the Norton Residence in New York City, in 1996-1998, which uses the principle of origami to fold in on itself, and the Weber Residence in Williamstown, Mass., 1992-94, whose roof echoes the line of rolling hills in the background. She has transformed a barn into a Frank Gehry-like marvel of colored light and air, "Langston Hughes Library," on Alex Haley Farm in Clinton, Tenn. And she created the perfect home for New York City's Museum of African Art in 1992-94. In addition, she makes art in her studio out of glass, metal and beeswax, and is represented by New York's Gagosian Gallery.

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"I disapprove of didactic art," she says. "I like art that creates a private moment for people to reflect on their own feelings and impressions." That's what the Vietnam Veterans Memorial provides, a private moment in a public place, a slate which vast numbers of people have used to envision their own stories. Growing up in Athens, Ohio, with a father who was a ceramic artist and a mother who was a college English professor, Lin wasn't aware of the Vietnam War. "I never wanted to make a comment on the war," she said. "I knew only that grief needs to be faced in order to pass through it." And yet, she herself wasn't willing to face the personal grief during the process of getting the memorial built. "Yes, that's a contradiction," she says. Lin is full of contradictions. She's a detached observer whose work elicits the most intense personal feelings from the public. To this day, Vietnam vets, meeting her, cry when they shake her hand. Maybe the description "detached observer" no longer describes her. "I agreed to do an artwork for Yellowstone National Park and decided to do something in reaction to the sea of cars surrounding natural wonders such as Old Faithful. I want it to be part of my final memorial about the waves of extinctions taking place across the earth. I'm calling it the 'Extinction Series' and have no idea what form it will take." She considers herself apolitical but shudders at the thought of George Bush as president. "The environment can't afford him," she says. "Gore is so much better." And she's no longer willing to tolerate slights that she used to brush off, such as the implication that she isn't really an American because her heritage is Chinese. "People say, 'Where are you from?' If I say, 'Ohio,' they say, 'No, where are you really from?' That happens all the time. I love to be in Washington state, where Gary Locke is governor. He's the only one, the only ChineseAmerican governor. Asian Americans are becoming more vocal, and it's about time." Politically engaged, environmentally active, decisively opinionated: Would her best friends even recognize her? "I hope so," she says, laughing. Architecture historian Vincent Scully found those same qualities in her when she was his student. "She's an absolutely clear-cutting blade," he told the filmmakers documenting her work. "The word for her is courage, courage and fiber. Nobody should make the mistake of thinking anything else."

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Interview: Maya Lin Artist and Architect June 16, 2000 Scottsdale, Arizona Back to Maya Lin Interview What was your childhood like, growing up in a small town in Ohio as the daughter of Chinese immigrants? Maya Lin: It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it. It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like. Growing up, I thought I was white. It didn't occur to me that I wasn't white. It probably didn't occur to me I was Asian-American until I was studying abroad in Denmark actually and there was a little bit of prejudice -- racial discrimination -- because as I get a suntan I look like a Greenlander. And as the U.S. had a certain prejudice against Native Americans, the Danes had a similar read towards the Greenlanders, and all of a sudden they would be moving away from me on the bus. They wouldn't sit next to me. There would be these weird comments. Growing up, I think I was very naive about fitting in. In reality, I was not a participant in many school functions. Our home life was very close knit. It was my mother, my father, my brother and me. I never knew my grandparents on either side. When I was very little, we would get letters from China, in Chinese, and they' be censored. We were a very insular little family. I really didn't socialize that much. I loved school. I studied like crazy. I was a Class A nerd. My dad was dean of fine arts at the university, and when I wasn't in school studying, I was taking a lot of independent courses at the university. And if I wasn't doing that, I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was basically using the university as a playground. I didn't fit in in high school at all. And I don't know if it was because I was different. I think it was my age. I looked much younger than most of my classmates, and in a way they were really nice to me, but almost as a baby sister. I think as a little girl there was a bit of a China doll sort of syndrome. They were friends and they were friendly, but I didn't date. I didn't really even begin to understand. I was really naive. So I studied and I loved getting A's. I think I had the highest grade point average in my high school. And I loved to study, but I had no extracurricular activities. My activities were absolutely isolated. I would make anything artistic at home. And I think creativity and my artistic drive emanates from that childhood. In a way I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world. Were you the oldest or the youngest?

Maya Lin: I'm the youngest. I have one older brother. How did that affect you? Did it matter? Maya Lin: Always tried to impress the older sibling. What does the older sibling do? Always try to humiliate the younger sibling. We had a very healthy sibling rivalry and fought a lot, and are best friends. We're very different and yet we're very close, in fact we collaborated on an art work of mine. He's an English professor and a poet. We did a piece for the Cleveland Public Library called "Reading A Garden." The centerpiece is a pool of water, and the title of the piece, "Reading A Garden" is spelled backwards but reflects forward in the water, which clues you in that this is a poetry garden. It's a poem laid out three dimensionally. It's all about words and the directionality and weight of reading. So we didn't fight the whole time. Collaborating on a work of art -- when you have two artists -- is very tricky. It took us 30 or 40 years to get to that point! Do you think your experience in school was a social circumstance or do you think you were really different? Even in high school you were a kind of super achiever taking college courses. Maya Lin: I had very few friends. I think my brother had a few more friends than me, but we stayed close to home, and I think we always ate dinner with our parents. We didn't want to go out. I think the whole American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with. We stayed very close to home. I think it wasn't just me. I think that's Chinese.

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We weren't going to the proms or going to the football games, or doing anything of that nature at all. I don't think I ever went to a football game, which at Athens High School was, you know, the Bulldogs were the Bulldogs! So there was a part of me that was like, "Oh, how many days do I have before I can get out of this town?" I mean, at one hand, you had a university there, so I could sneak out and take courses. But at the other hand, it's Athens High, and it was tough to fit in, and I was aware of that by the time I hit my senior year. I basically was taking almost all of my courses independent study, and taking many of my courses at the university, and counting the days, 'cause I knew I didn't quite fit in at that point and I was desperate to kind of get out of there, and you know, it was almost more instinct. How do you think that experience affected you? Maya Lin: I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies, let's face it. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that. You couldn't put me in a social group setting. It's different with a group of friends, but as far as clubs go -- I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down. My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, question standards and traditions. How did your parents influence you? Maya Lin: We were unusually brought up in that there was no gender differentiation. I was lucky as a girl to never ever be thought of as any less than my brother. The only thing that mattered was what you were to do in life, and it wasn't about money. It was about teaching, or learning. There was a very strong emphasis on academic study within the family, especially on my mother's side. I loved school, and all I wanted to do was keep going to school. I think I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. All my friends were going, "Phew, aren't we glad it's over?" but my whole world has been a college environment. I really respect people that focus their energies on education, on learning for the sake of learning. As a child, I was never told I couldn't do something because I happen to...