Maya Lin's earthly concerns
The artist known for her memorials wants her final one to call attention to the environment.
SAN DIEGO — MAYA LIN has always had a deep feeling for the land. As a child, she roamed the leafy woods of the Appalachian foothills in southern Ohio, listening to the mating calls of the songbirds that filled the forest. Now Lin perceives a growing stillness, as the number of songbirds across America are decimated by habitat destruction.
The growing degradation of the natural world haunts Lin -- celebrated as the creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the reinventor of the American memorial genre -- as she pulls together the plans for what she says will be her "last memorial."
The title of this work-in-progress, like many of the details, is evolving: Perhaps "What is Missing," perhaps simply "Missing." But the theme is clear: Lin's finale will grieve for the animals, birds and plants driven into extinction -- and warn of the urgency of acting now to halt the devastation.
Lin envisions it as a multisite chronicle, including photography and video, at places around the world and with a commemorative list of names -- this time the names of extinct species. It is to be launched with a memorial table on Earth Day in April 2009 commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, which chose her design to include inits new building in Golden Gate Park, an academy spokeswoman said.
"Do the math, guys. Where do we want to be in 50 years? That's the question," she said at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego as she installed her latest exhibit in a cathedral-like gallery lighted by the afternoon sun.
"We're in the sixth-largest extinction in the Earth's history, and it's the only one caused by a single species," Lin said. "The top 10 songbirds we grew up with are in a 40% to 70% decline. Our oceans are being devastated by overfishing. The landscape we grew up with has been significantly diminished. I just want to bring attention to it and give people the idea that you can do something about it."
At 48, Lin might seem young to hold the status of éminence grise of memorials, a position of gravitas that began when her design for the Veterans Memorial was chosen while she was 21 and a student at Yale. She has become so associated with monuments that when terrorists attacked on 9/11, a flood of faxes cascaded into her Soho studio asking her to prepare a memorial sketch.
