Maya lin biography video walt
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Maya lin
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Maya Lin: “What is Missing?”
Maya Lin has maintained a careful balance between art and architecture throughout her career, creating a remarkable body of work that includes large-scale site-specific installations, intimate studio artworks, architectural works and memorials. Landscape is the context and the source of inspiration for Ms. Lin’s art. She peers curiously at the landscape through a twenty-first century lens, merging rational and technological order with notions of beauty and the transcendental. Utilizing technological methods to study and visualize the natural world, Ms. Lin takes micro and macro views of the earth, sonar resonance scans, aerial and satellite mapping devices and translates that information into sculptures, drawings and environmental installations. Her works address how we relate and respond to the environment, and presents new ways of looking at the world around us. From recent environmental works such as Storm King Wavefield, Where the Land Meets the Sea and Eleven Minute Line to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where she cut open the land and polished its edges to create a history embedded in the earth, Ms. Lin has consistently explored how we experience the landscape. She has made works that merge completely with the terrain, blurring the boundarie
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Maya Lin’s Memorial to Vanishing Nature
In , a Yale undergraduate named Maya Lin was catapulted to global prominence when her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., was chosen over 1, other entries. Her striking creation — a black stone gash in the earth inscribed with the names of more than 58, American soldiers killed in the Vietnam War — remains one of the world’s most moving war monuments.
Photo by Walter Smith
Maya Lin
Now, three decades later, Lin has turned her attention to what she calls her “last memorial” — a global multimedia project aimed at drawing attention to the rapid loss of biodiversity and natural abundance. Centered around an interactive Web site that features more than 75 videos, scores of audio recordings of birds and animals, and photos and text that are an elegy for lost and threatened species, Lin’s “What is Missing?” project has the same arresting, unsettling qualities that are a hallmark of her Vietnam memorial.
In an interview with Yale Environment contributor Diane Toomey, Lin talks about the origins of her What is Missing? project, the media techniques she and her collaborators are using to draw attention to the biodiversity crisis, and the actions that give her hope that we can reverse the tide of nature’s des