LIN, MAYA

born Oct. 5, 1959, Athens, Ohio, U.S. American architect and sculptor, best known for her design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Lin was the daughter of intellectuals who had fled China in 1948. In 1981 Lin received her bachelor's degree from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where she studied architecture and sculpture. During her senior year she entered a nationwide competition sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to create a design for a monument honouring those who had served and died in that war. Lin's award-winning design consisted of a simple polished black granite V-shaped wall inscribed with the names of the approximately 58,000 men and women who were killed or missing in action. The memorial, dedicated in Washington, D.C., on Veterans Day 1982, aroused a great deal of controversy, reflecting the lack of resolution of the national conflicts over the war. Lin sought anonymity by returning to academia, beginning graduate studies in architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In early 1983 she left Harvard to work for a Boston architect, but in 1986 she completed a master's in architecture at Yale. As time passed, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, widely known as the Wall, became a well-respected work of public art. In 1988 Lin agreed to design a monument for the Civil Rights Movement on behalf of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Her design consisted of two elements, a curved black granite wall inscribed with a quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr., and a 12-foot- (3.7-metre-) diameter disk bearing the dates of the major events of the civil rights era and the names of 40 persons who were martyrs to the cause. Water flows gently over both parts of the memorial. The Civil Rights Memorial was dedicated in Montgomery, Alabama, in November 1989. Among her other large-scale works are Topo, a topiary park in Charlotte, North Carolina; Women's Table, a sculpture commemorating the coeducation of women at Yale; and Groundswell, an installation of 43 tons of glass pebbles at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. In 1995 a feature-length film, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, won the Oscar for best documentary.