MAYA LIN!

She considers herself an artist and an architect.  She does studio work, architectural work, memorials, and large scale installations.  She takes micro and macro views of the art and translates them into her installations.  She does this because she wants to see "how we relate and respond to the environment, and present new ways of looking at the world around us."

The artist-architect first made a name for herself in 1981 when, as a junior at the Yale School of Architecture, her pioneering design—two long black granite walls, partly submerged in the ground, incised with names of dead and missing soldiers—won a national competition to become the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. "The effect of onlookers' reflections superimposed over the 58,000 engraved names attempts to symbolically integrate past and present."

Lin is also considered an environmentalist, she as consistently focused on environmental concerns, promoting sustainable building design in her architectural works, while making the environment the subject of her artworks. She is "deeply committed to focusing attention back to the environment and to ask us to pay closer attention to the natural world." 

Lin is currently working on what will be her last memorial, entitled What is Missing? which will focus on bringing awareness to the current crisis surrounding biodiversity and habitat loss. "It's about revealing things that are diminishing from nature, and from the natural world, that you might not even know about," she says, "as well as focusing on the extreme, sixth extinction of the planet—caused not by an asteroid but by the actions of a single species." She means us.

Fun Facts:

She graduated from Yale University.  In 2005 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.  She has been featured in Time Magazine.  She had a documentary written about her, a biography, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision.   This won a Academy Award for Best Documentary. Lin and her family traveled to South America, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, India, Southeast Asia, and China.