MAYA LIN

Maya Lin is an artist, designer, and environmentalist who has received both the National Medal of Arts (2009) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2016). She began her illustrious career at Yale University where, as an undergraduate student, she won a public competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC (1982). Since then, Lin has built a practice that balances her interests in art and architecture while remaining firmly committed to what she terms her Memory Works. Focusing on key historical moments in this country’s history, such works include the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (1989), the Women’s Table for Yale University (1995), the Confluence Project along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest (2004–present), and What is Missing? (1999–present), a multi-sited and internet-based memorial to the planet.  

Her fellowship with the Lunder Institute is an acknowledgement of her achievements as an artist who has re-envisioned monuments and whose practice actively contributes to a deeper understanding of human impacts on the environment. Throughout the year, Lin will participate in online collaborations with students, faculty, and community members, including academic engagements with Colby courses.  

In the spring of 2021, the Lunder Institute hosted a public conversation between Lin and some of her faculty collaborators to engage the community on topics related to the intersection between art and the environment. Additional events highlighted related collaborative work, academic engagement, and research at Colby. In keeping with Lin’s firm commitment to reduce carbon emissions and in light of the College’s plans related to COVID-19, Lin’s participation has taken place virtually. Jessamine Batario, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, is organizing Lin’s academic engagements and related programs, continuing the Institute’s collaborative work with the Center for Arts and Humanities and the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment on projects related to climate change. 

“As an artist, so much of my work has focused on issues surrounding the environment and our relationship to nature, and I look forward to these presentations and discussions at Colby, whose Environmental Studies department is one of the oldest in the country, and who also has such a strong commitment to the arts.”  

At the outset of the fellowship, Lin noted, “I’m looking forward to participating in courses at Colby both in the fall and spring semesters, and to sharing my processes and approaches in my art practice, as well as to creating a working dialogue with faculty and students about my ongoing environmental project, What is Missing?”.  

Lin has consistently focused on utilizing scientific methodology to create artworks that draw the viewer’s attention to nature in order to consider our relationship to it. From large-scale earthworks to intimate sculptural mappings of terrain, waterways, and mountains, Lin’s work reveals aspects of the natural world that are oftentimes overlooked. Much of Lin’s artistic practice has focused on water as a precious resource. Her wall installations utilize recycled silver, glass marbles, and stainless-steel pins to represent aerial perspectives of rivers around the world. Her marble series Disappearing Bodies of Water likewise provides a visual record of a diminishing resource over time. Questioning both materiality and form, Lin’s “last memorial,” What is Missing?, is a virtual project and interactive website devoted to the global biodiversity crisis related to habitat loss. A memorial in a different form, the project documents shared stories and bears witness to the crisis as it unfolds, simultaneously raising awareness about our present while reserving hope for our future. 

Lin’s artwork has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, both in the United States and abroad. Her works are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the California Academy of Sciences. The documentary, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1994. 

The Colby College Museum of Art is proud to have several of Lin’s works in its permanent collection, including Pin River Kissimmee (2008) and Disappearing Bodies of Water: Arctic Ice (2013), both in the Lunder Collection. More recently, the Museum acquired Interrupted River: Penobscot (2019), a site-specific commission developed for Occupy Colby: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy. Lin’s Interrupted River served as a centerpiece for the exhibition, and the large-scale glass marble installation localized the global conversation to the Penobscot River in Maine. In addition to her art being well represented in the Colby Museum, Lin delivered the Miles and Katharine Culbertson Prentice Distinguished Lecture at Colby in April 2016.