Passage IV

Maya Lin: Her Work

To the surprise of many, it was a college student, Maya Lin who won the 1981 competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Although Lin's nonrepresentational design initially stirred up a controversy, the completed monument has won widespread acclaim for a while now. Visitors to the monument in Washington, D.C., encounter two long black granite walls that meet at an angle as they cut into the ground. Inscribed in the highly polished walls are the names of the more than 58,000 United States military personnel lost in the war.

While some sculptors suggest the magnitude of an event by presenting larger-than-life figures, Lin relies on more understated methods to suggest matters of great significance. (50) Since the unveiling of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Lin has applied this approach in different parts of the country and to different eras of United States history. (52) In 1988, she designed a memorial to honor individuals killed in the civil rights movement. Located in Montgomery, Alabama, Maya Lin made this work consist of a low granite disk on which the names of the dead appear along with references to landmark events of the movement. In addition, my research turned up the following information. (54) Behind the disk stands a granite wall bearing their inscription: "...UNTIL JUSTICE ROLLS DOWN LIKE WATERS AND RIGHTEOUSNESS LIKE A MIGHTY STREAM." Lin selected these words from a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.speech, and in the monument, water flows down the wall, over Dr. King's words, and out from the center of the disk. (57)

Lin continues to challenge herself in a career that combines an appreciation for sculpture, architecture, and the complexity of human experience. A public library in Ohio, a chapel in Pennsylvania, a train station in New York—these had been only some of the places that have been influenced by Maya Lin. It is possible to come away from her work with the sense that the distinctions we sometimes make between public and personal life are blurred in moments of genuine reflection.