Maya Lin burst onto the art scene while still an undergraduate at Yale University in 1981, when she won a national contest to design the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from Yale that same year, and stuck with the school to obtain a Master of Architecture in 1986. Lin had previously taken art and sculpture courses at Ohio University, where her mother was a professor of literature and her father was the Dean of the College of Fine Arts, while she was still in high school.
Lin credits her experience as a child of immigrants with imparting a slightly different perspective into her art. She has said that growing up with Chinese parents made her constantly question not only her identity, but also her sense of home. Being strongly tied to two cultures made Lin branch out and explore even more cultures and traditions to inform her artistic style. She draws on Japanese gardens, Native American works, and earthenworks from 1960s and 70s American artists for much of her inspiration.
Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial provides a minimalistic contrast to most war memorials designed before the 80s. Until then, war memorials had a tendency to paint a heroic picture of war, rather than focusing on the names of the fallen themselves. In Lin’s design, the names of the 58,000 men and women who were killed or missing in action are minimalistically displayed on a polished granite V-shaped wall, allowing the viewer to be completely surrounded by the number of people taken by that war.
Lin and her family split their time between city life in New York and the more rural and relaxing Colorado. This time away from the city stimulates the kind of creativity seen in her recent work, which tends to focus more on nature and environmental issues, about which she has always been passionate. In a recent exhibit in Madison Square Park, Lin took 49 dead cedar trees from the New Jersey Pine Barrens and placed them in NYC as a testament to the devastation of climate change.