Maya Lin, an artist, described her approach to architecture and art, as well as her desire to get people to think about climate change during the 2022 Frey Lecture at Carolinas FedEx Global Education Center on April 12.
The College of Arts & Sciences bestows the Frey Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professship to distinguished public leaders. This free lecture is open to the public and was established in 1989. It brings on campus distinguished speakers from many fields, including politics, government, and international affairs.
Lin was introduced by Kevin M. Guskiewicz, the Chancellor. Lin is most well-known for winning the 1982 design competition to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. while still a Yale undergraduate. Her simple design of black granite panels rising from the ground in V-shapes, features the names of all American war servicemen who died. Since then, she has been involved in the design of other notable memorials, such as Montgomery’s Civil Rights Memorial.
Lins artwork has been displayed in solo exhibitions at museums around the world. There are also works in the permanent collections of both the Metropolitan Museum of Art (among others) and the National Gallery of Art (among others). She has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Arts.
Lin opened a 50-minute photo tour of some of her creations. Lin said that she sees her work as a tripod. Art, architecture, and memorials. She said that she will always talk about all three.
She has often been occupied by bodies of water and waveforms, which has led to museum pieces and site-specific installations.
Lin shared the story of how she created the wave fields and how they grew. Lin said that she was inspired to create the first of these waves, a project at University of Michigan. She was inspired by a photo of a Stokes-wave, a naturally occurring waterway. She said that she saw the photo and decided to create a piece about it. The Wave Field was born, a 10,000-foot area of grassy waves each three to five feet tall. She said that you could curl up in a wave to read a book until the sprinklers start to pop up.
Even after the project was completed in 1995, she still had a fascination with the form. She said that I am an artist who works in series. Perhaps it’s because I vary a lot in my medium. An iteration, or a series, allows me explore an idea, change scale, and then move on. I am very site-specific. I also relate to the site.
She wanted to continue her experiments with waveforms for a 2005 commission that was outside of the U.S. Federal Courthouse, Miami. She explained that they were very concerned about snipers so she made waves in Flutter, which is only 2 feet high, to evoke how water ripples through the sand. Its waves are smaller but its footprint is twice as big as the Michigan piece.
The final work in the series, covering four acres of an old gravel pit at New Windsor’s Storm King Art Center, New York, her wave work, reached its peak in 2009. Storm King Wavefield has waves that are 12-18 feet high. She said that she wanted to know if there was a wave field that would allow you to get lost. Because I am site-specific, I had to make a dialogue with distant hills. Everything else was too small and didn’t really fit the landscape.
Her three-wave fields provide insight into her artistic process. She often interviews people and has to assure them that the answers may not be included in the final artwork. She called it a fishing expedition. Because the site doesn’t just exist as a physical place. It’s a cultural context. What’s the story behind these buildings? Who is there? Who will use it? How can I reflect this in my work?
Lin has also been inspired by other aspects of nature and the environment. Lin has also done Earth drawings in New Jersey, Kentucky, and Sweden. For a piece called Ghost Forest, which was intended to draw attention to the effects of climate change, she installed 49 dead Atlantic Cedar trees in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park in 2021.
She is currently working on What is Missing?, which she calls her last memorial. It is a global, cross-platform memorial to the planet. The work is available online, in a book, and at select scientific institutions. It calls attention to the global crisis of biodiversity and habitat loss.
She suggested that maybe as an artist, you might be able to get you to rethink the problem or put it in a way you weren’t expecting.
Edward J. Frey and Frances Frey founded the Frey Foundation in Grand Rapids (Michigan) in 1974. Their son, David Gardner Frey 64 (JD), an alumnus of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is the former chairman of this foundation and a longtime supporter of College of Arts & Sciences.
