M is for Maya Lin, (1959-still living!) an American
installation artist, architectural designer, and author.
As a child, Maya was a homebody
with few friends. She had a close-knit family (dad, mom, and one brother), and
she loved school, studying, and doing creative things. Since she didn’t have
many playmates, Maya made up her own world with art.
Maya’s parents raised her
and her brother without gender differentiation. Her
mother told her that she could aspire to any passion she had, as long as it was
wholesome and not centered around money. Art was Maya’s passion from childhood,
but she did not realize it at first. In college, she initially majored in
pre-med zoology and wanted to work with animals. After the university’s advisor
told her that her coursework would include dissecting live animals, Maya
realized that she no longer wanted to study zoology. She switched her major and
earned her bachelor’s and master’s degree in architecture.
When she was 21 years old and still in college, Maya entered a national contest
to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Maya’s design (Entry #1026) won out of
1,421 submissions. Her design was a granite, V-shaped black wall with the names
of slain or missing soldiers from the Vietnam War carved into its surface. The
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall is in Washington D.C., and there are 58,272
names carved into the wall.
Maya received controversy for winning the contest. Among Vietnam veteran survivors, politicians, and
other critics, Maya was deemed too young and inexperienced to know enough about
the war to design the memorial. Along with age discrimination, she faced racial
discrimination as well, when former presidential candidate Ross Perot called her an “eggroll” once he learned that
the winner of the contest was Asian-American. To this day, Maya believes that she would have lost the contest if submissions had to include the designer’s name and not just an entry number.
Recalling this experience, Maya felt like the most hurtful thing was not
the discrimination; what hurt her most was that her design had to be
compromised. Maya wished for the memorial to pay tribute to the lives of the
veterans with no regard to the political issues of the war. She knew that some
of the families of fallen soldiers were against the war, and some supported the
war. She wanted to design a memorial that would be sensitive to both sides by being
apolitical and simply acknowledging the lives lost. Still, two traditional
statues and the American flag were added to the memorial. When the wall was
dedicated in 1982, Maya received no recognition. But as time passed, her
memorial design proved its effect on people. The memorial is visited by as many
as four million people every year.
When the families of veterans come to visit this memorial, they touch
the names and are able to see their reflections on the wall. The experience is
said to allow visitors to feel as if they are part of the fallen soldier whose
name is being touched.
In 1988, Maya also designed the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery
Alabama. This memorial pays tribute to lives lost in the Civil Rights movement.
Maya went on to design many more sites. Her accomplishments have made
her the feature of an Academy Award-winning documentary titled Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. She
also wrote a book titled Boundaries. In
2003, Maya served as a judge for the World Trade Center Memorial Competition. In
2005, she was elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame and the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. Maya received the National Medal of Arts award in
2009.
If you ask Maya what inspires her art, she will tell you:
“My work originates
from a simple desire to make people aware of their surroundings and this can
include not just the physical but the psychological world that we live in.”
How do you feel about Maya's story? Have you visited any of the sites she designed? What are your thoughts on age discrimination?
