Maya Lin

Maya Lin has maintained a careful balance in her career between art and architecture, creating a remarkable body of work that includes large-scale site-specific installations, intimate studio artworks and architectural works such as a chapel and library for the Children's Defense Fund and an Environmental Learning Lab for Manhattanville College.

In her large-scale environmental artworks, Lin has consistently explored how we experience and relate to the landscape. From her recent works such as Eleven Minute Line (2004, an earthen line 1600 feet long by 12 feet high, traversing a meadow in Sweden) and Flutter (2005, a 20,000-square-foot sculpted earthwork commissioned for a federal courthouse in Miami), back to her very first—the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where she cut open the land and polished its edges to create a history embedded in the earth—she has made works that merge completely with the terrain, blurring the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional space and setting up a systematic ordering of the land that is tied to history, time and language.

Maya Lin's studio artwork has been shown in solo museum exhibitions in the U.S., Italy, Denmark and Sweden, and at Gagosian Gallery, which represents her. The exhibition Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes at Seattle's Henry Art Gallery and currently at the St. Louis, Missouri Contemporary Gallery, is the first to translate the scale and coherence of her outdoor installations to the interior space of a museum.

Maya Lin serves on the board of trustees of the Natural Resources Defense Council and is a member of the Yale Corporation. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Presidential Design Award, an AIA Honor Award, the Finn Juhl Prize and honorary doctorates from Yale, Harvard, Williams College and Smith College. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.