Maya Lin
Maya Lin is an American architect, sculptor, and land artist born on October 5, 1959, in Athens.
Lin attended Athens High School before going on to study at Saybrook College at Yale University. Her practice spans multiple disciplines, including architecture, sculpture, landscape architecture, and printmaking, and she works in English.
Among her notable works are The Wall, The Women's Table, and Above and Below. These pieces represent different facets of her output as an artist who operates across the fields of sculpture, land art, and architecture.
Lin has received a number of significant honors over the course of her career. These include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Arts, the Rome Prize, and the Rachel Carson Award. She has also been named to Time magazine's Time 100 list. Taken together, these recognitions reflect the range of her work as an architect, sculptor, and landscape architect.
Quotes by Maya Lin
Maya Lin's insights on:
I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It’s like a thread of life.
You couldn’t put me in a social group setting. I’m probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
Art is very tricky because it’s what you do for yourself. It’s much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.
A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don’t see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time.
My grandfather, on my father’s side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.
Our parents decided not to teach us Chinese. It was an era when they felt we would be better off if we didn’t have that complication.
Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don’t want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.
I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn’t want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with.