Maya Lin

Recently, Maya Lin had large exhibitions at New York’s PaceWildenstein and at Storm King Art Center and a show of playful, smaller work at Salon 94, also in New York.

Lin has used a range of materials and processes to make art since the work that started it all—the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial—in 1982. Notably, this commission melded and reshaped several fields—drawing, architecture, site-specific sculpture, memorial art, and land transformation.

What is Missing?, Lin’s latest memorial, debuted at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco on September 17 and will debut online at whatismissing.net on Earth Day 2010. Storm King Wavefield, an earth sculpture that transforms a former gravel pit into seven acres of undulating waves, opened this spring.

Sacajawea State Park, the site of the newest leg of her $27 million Confluence Project, comprised of seven sites along the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington states, is about to open. The project, reflecting Lin’s commitment to linking aesthetic creations with habitat and species preservation and with the histories of Northwest Coast Native Americans and Lewis and Clark, is a huge undertaking that speaks directly to America’s cultural heritage and future.

Lin has stated that her “creative process balances analytic study based on research with, in the end, a purely intuited gesture.” She employs tools such as models, grids, and topographic drawings as well as more advanced scientific technology (sonar and radar mapping, satellite photographs) to study and respond to regions of the natural world that are often impossible to observe with the naked eye. Among her notable architecture projects, Lin designed the 14,000-square-foot Museum of Chinese in America at 211-215 Centre Street, New York City, which opened in the fall.