Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Maya Lin (By: Heidi G.)


Maya Lin was born in Athens, Ohio in 1959. Lin's father was a ceramist and the former dean at the Ohio College of Fine Arts. Her mother was a former professor at Ohio University. Maya Lin's aunt is Lin Huiyin who is said to be the first woman architect in China. Lin did a lot of studying at Yale University and Yale conferred upon Lin an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Fine Arts. At age 21 Lin won a public design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. The memorial is v-shaped with one end pointing to the Lincoln Memorial and the other pointing to the Washington Monument. Lin's main goal in designing the monument was to create an opening or wound to symbolize the gravity of the loss of American soldiers to the Vietnam War. When making her architectural structures Lin wants to include the individual within the landscape she is creating. Maya Lin gets inspiration for her projects from many different diverse cultures. She finds great interest in Hopewell Indian earthen mounds, Japanese Gardens, and from American earthwork artists form the 1960's and 1970's. Ohio University commissioned Lin to make a punch card park, a park that the University actually wanted to resemble a punch card. The park at first was criticized because it seemed uninviting to most. It was an open park with mounds that lacked trees to shade students who would study in the park. Since the creation of the park some trees have been planted but from an aerial view the park still resembles a punch card. Maya Lin is one of the most well achieved woman architects and sculptors in America today. Lin now lives and makes art in New York and Colorado.
(www.pbs.org/art21)
(www.gagosian.com)

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