A Celebration of Women

is honored to Celebrate the Life of this amazing talent; one that carries with her a social conscience and intergrity. Celebrate with us a woman that used her talent to help others, create positive change and encourage a social responsibility.

WOMAN of ACTION

Maya Lin

“ I really did mean for people to cry.”

Maya Lin says of the ‘Wall’.

Maya Lin was born in Athens, Ohio, on October 5, 1959, of Chinese lineage. Maya attended Yale University and graduated in 1981 with a bachelor’s degree in architecture and sculpture.

Design original submission….

During her senior year, she entered a contest for the design of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial. Her design was chosen and accepted, winning the contest.

Maya’s design turned into the polished, black granite wall with the names of over 58,000 individuals who were missing in action or killed in Vietnam. The memorial now sits in Washington D.C. It was dedicated in 1982 on Veteran’s Day, and is known to many as “the Wall.

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 in which she spoke of the monument design process.

Confucianism is a philosophy based on the teachings of Confucius, a social philosopher of China, whose teachings have deeply influenced East Asia for centuries (551-479 B.C.). It originated about 500 B.C., later becoming the state religion of China and the single most important force in Chinese life.”

Ren is symbolized by a black stick figure pictograph of a person’s two legs spread in a standing position. In its cosmic spiritual sense, ren is defined as a journey from life to death and back again and embraces a humanistic view that everyone should strive to live in harmony because all people are as one. Simply put, and in comparison, those who believe in God, trust in God. Those who believe in Confucianism trust in human beings for their source of values and have very little belief in theology or the afterlife.

Maya attended graduate school at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She left the college, however, in 1983 to work as a Boston architect. She completed her Masters at Yale University in 1986.

SAINT LOUIS, MO – The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes, an exhibition that explores how we see, and come to understand, landscape in a crucial time. Maya Lin, who examines how our current relationship to landscape is extended, condensed, distorted, and mapped via new technologies, translates these systematized spaces of the natural world into objects and environments that can be engaged physically.

The Artist Maya: http://www.artknowledgenews.com/Maya_Lin-Systematic_Landscapes.

Sculpture of 2×4 on display at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, 2009

ALSO, the Wave Field at the University of Michigan (1995).

In 2000, Lin re-emerged in the public life with a book Boundaries. 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.

Maya Lin’s ‘Women’s Table’ in front of the Sterling Memorial Library commemorating-

… the Role of Women at Yale University.

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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.

p style=”text-align: center;”>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 punched 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.

At first the park was criticized for being relatively uninviting (with punched card 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 punched 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.

In 2007, Lin installed “Above and Below”, an outdoor sculpture at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana. “Above and Below” is made of aluminum tubing that has been electrolytically colored during the anodization process.

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. Her current projects include an installation at the Storm King Art Center.

In 2009, Lin completed “Silver River,” her first work of art in Las Vegas, which is part of a public fine art collection at MGM Mirage’s CityCenter, which opened December 2009. Lin created an 84-foot (26 m) cast of the Colorado River made entirely of reclaimed silver. With the sculpture, Lin wanted to make a statement about water conservation and the importance of the Colorado River to Nevada in terms of energy and water. The sculpture is displayed behind the front desk of the Aria Resort & Casino.

In 2009, Maya Lin was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.

In May 2010, participants in Sunday’s Venice Art & Architecture Tour will experience a nearly completed, 4,000-square-foot row house that is being lauded as artist and architect Maya Lin’s first residential project west of the Mississippi. The property is owned by Christine Nichols, an art dealer and curator of drawings and other works on paper who is a longtime resident of the Venice walk-streetwhere she owns the three-level, Lin-designed “urban beach house.”

The address of this first residential commission, is the number 33 (the Number for Conscience). Maya Lin is the perfect

architect to have chosen, one with great social conscience and integrity. This design should carry with it some great energy.

As part of the tour, Nichols will display some of the original drawings, studies and elevations made by the architect during the design process. “The chance to work with someone who is as thoughtful as Maya Lin was riveting,” she said.

Nichols and Lin met in 2000, introduced by Russell Ferguson, then associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Family is her Love these days, never forgetting

her talent or vision…..

Lin, who now owns and operates Maya Lin Studio in New York City, and is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York.

She lives today in New York City with her two children and husband, Daniel Wolf. Her primary enjoyment these days is family and sculpture.

FIND MAYA HERE:

Website: http://www.mayalin.com/

Stanford Lectures: http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/lin/

Architectural League, N.Y.:

http://archleague.org/2009/10/museum-of-chinese-in-america-moca/

A Celebration of Women

sends our blessings and reams of Gratitude

for her Bravery and Courage

in Talent that has been used very well, for the betterment of others.

Brava Maya!