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Maya Lin has created a remarkable body of work that includes large-scale site-specific installations and intimate studio works. In all of this work, wrote Judith Stein in Art in America, “there is a consistent visual intelligence that transcends categorization.”
An artist who subtly but decisively alters the viewer’s relationship to space and landscape, the artwork’s relationship to natural form and built environment, Lin first came to prominence when she redefined the idea memorial, with her Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Since then, she has created works at all scales that re-order our categories of understanding: blurring the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional space and re-imagining the grids of history, language and mathematics by which humans encounter the natural world.
Lin’s artwork has been shown in solo museum exhibitions in the United States, Italy, Denmark, and Sweden, and at the Gagosian Gallery. Lin’s work looks at the landscape through a 21st century lens, often using technology to re-imagine and re-think what the land is and our relationship to it. A committed environmentalist, her work often asks the viewer to take a closer look at the natural world. The exhibition, Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes, currently showing through Dec 31st at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and will continue to tour to several venues across the country, picks up the thread of her previous museum exhibition, Topologies, continuing its exploration of people’s relationship to the land; but it is also a departure, as the first exhibition that has carefully translated the scale and coherence of her outdoor installations to the interior space of a museum.
Lin’s best-known works are her large, site-specific art installations. They include Groundswell, for the Wexner Center for the Arts; Wave Field for the University of Michigan; 10 degrees North for The Rockefeller Foundation; Eclipsed Time for MTA Arts in Transit, for New York’s Pennsylvania Station; and eleven minute line, an earthen line,1600 feet long by12 feet high, traversing a meadow in Kniesling, Sweden. Completed in 2004 for the Wanås Foundation, eleven minute line is the first in a series of works that will explore the character and identity of a line drawing, as experienced on the boundary between two- and three-dimensional space.
Other recent large-scale artworks include Input (2004) for Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, a 3.5-acre array of raised and lowered earthworks inscribed with a text written by the artist’s brother, Tan Lin, about childhood memory and one’s connection to a place; Flutter (2005), a 20,000 square foot sculpted earthwork, reminiscent of the patterns cast on the ocean floor by waves, for the Federal Courthouse; and her largest earthwork to date is currently being built at Storm King Arts Center, covering 4 acres it will be the final wave field in the series. Lin’s studio-scale artworks are in the permanent collections of major institutions throughout the United States, including The Museum of Modern Art, and in numerous private collections.
Maya Lin is the recipient of numerous awards. Most recently she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, becoming the youngest artist ever to be so honored. She also has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her work was chronicled in the documentary film Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision (Academy Award, best feature-length documentary, 1996), and she has been a subject of the program Art 21: Art in the 21st Century on PBS. The national press has focused on her consistently over the years, from Time magazine (which included her in its list of "Fifty for the Future" in 1994) to Smithsonian (which in 2005 selected her as one of “35 Who Made a Difference”).
EDUCATION:
Yale University, School of Architecture
Master of Architecture 1986
Yale College, Major in Architecture
Bachelor of Arts, cum laude 1981
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS:
Systematic Landscapes, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA 2006
Maya Lin, Wanas Foundation, Wanas, Sweden 2004
Maya Lin’s Designs for East Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 2004
Maya Lin/ Finn Juhl, The Danish Museum of Decorative Art, Copenhagen,
Denmark, 2003
Between Art and Architecture, Cooper Union School of Art, New York, NY 2000
Maya Lin: Recent Work, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1999
Maya Lin, American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy, 1998
Maya Lin: Topologies
SECCA, Winston-Salem, NC 1998
Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH 1998
Grey Art Gallery, NY University, New York, NY 1998
Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA 1999
Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX 1999
Designing Industrial Ecology, Bronx Community Paper Company, Municipal Art Society,
New York, NY 1997
Public/Private, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH 1993
SELECTED GROUP SHOWS:
US Design: 1975-2000
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO 2003
Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, New York, NY 2003
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN 2003-04
Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX 2003-04
Illusions of Eden: Visions of the American Heartland
Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio 2000
Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, Austria 2000
Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary 2000
Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin 2001
Washington Pavilion, Sioux Falls, Washington 2001
Nature: Contemporary Art and the Natural World
Marywood University, Scranton, PA 2000
Powder
curated by Julie Graham and Maria Friedrich
The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado 1999
SELECTED HONORS AND AWARDS:
AIA Twenty-Five Year Award for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 2007
Good Design Award from the Chicago Athenaeum for Stones, 2006
National Women’s Hall of Fame, inducted 2005
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, 2005
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2005
Anderson Ranch Artist Award, 2004
Finn Juhl Prize, 2003
Frank Annunzio Award Winner for the Arts, Christopher Columbus Foundation, 2000
American Academy of Arts and Letters, Award in Architecture, 1996
LVMH, Science pour L’Art Award, 1996
Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, Academy Award Winner, Best Documentary, 1995
Frieda Mock, Director, American Film Foundation Production
NEA Visual Artists Fellowship, Sculpture, 1988
SELECTED RESIDENCIES:
Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, Gwathmey Award, 2000
American Academy in Rome
William A. Bernoudy Resident in Architecture, Rome, Italy, 1998-1999
University of California / Berkley
Townsend Center for the Humanities, Avenalli Professorship, 1995
Pilchuk Residency, Pilchuk, Washington, 1994
COLLECTIONS:
Spencer Collection, New York Public Library, New York, NY
Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA
Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH
Viart Corporation, Goldman Sachs
The Art Collection Trust
Neuberger Berman Collection
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA
The New Museum, New York, NY
MoMA, New York
Various private collections
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