 |
 |
1959 -
Maya Ying Lin, born in 1959, was an American architect and sculptor from Ohio. From an artistically distinguished Chinese family who emigrated to the United States in the 1940s, Lin was catapulted to national prominence while still an undergraduate at Yale when her magisterially simple design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (completed 1982) won a national competition. It is a sloping, V-shaped, 493-ft (150-m) wall of highly polished black granite that descends 10 feet (3.05 meters) below grade level at its vertex. Often called simply “The Wall,” it is inscribed with the names of the more than 58,000 Americans killed or missing during the Vietnam War. The austere, abstract nature of Lin's design, which was selected after a nationwide competition, at first made it a controversial way of memorializing the war's casualties.
|
|
In the years since its construction, however, the simple, evocative, and starkly dramatic wall has become a national shrine, drawing more annual visitors than the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial. Two nearby sculptures also honor those who served in the war; one is of three soldiers by Frederick E. Hart (erected 1984), the other of three nurses and a wounded soldier by Glenna Goodacre (erected 1993). She cemented her status as a major figure with her sculptural design for the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (1989) and a monument commemorating coeducation at Yale (1991).
More recently she has also executed other kinds of
architectural projects, e.g., several private houses and the Museum of African
Art (1993) and a huge clock at Pennsylvania Station (1994), both in New York
City. She also designs furniture, and her sculpture has been widely exhibited.
Whatever the context or scale of the work, Lin is known for her visual poetry
and sensitive mingling of highly abstract form with meaning.