Maya Lin: “What is Missing?”

Maya Lin, has short black bob and is wearing black dress with high neck

 Maya Lin. Photo by Walter Smith.

Maya Lin’s work encompasses large-scale environmental installations, intimate studio artworks, architectural works, and memorials. She will discuss her body of work focused on a profound respect and love for the natural environment along with her final memorial, the What is Missing? project, which asks viewers to reconsider nature and the environment at a time when it is crucial to do so. The talk will be followed by a short Q&A and attendees will be invited to add their own environmental memories to the What is Missing?


Maya Lin is currently working on what is her final memorial, What is Missing? which focuses on bringing awareness to the current crisis surrounding biodiversity and habitat loss.
Artwork, liquid silver is spilled on white background, fraying

Maya Lin, Silver San Francisco Bay, recycled silver, 48.5″ x 33.5″ x.5″, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

Maya Lin, "What's Missing"

Maya Lin, "What's Missing"

Maya Lin has maintained a careful balance between art and architecture throughout her career, creating a remarkable body of work that includes large-scale site-specific installations, intimate studio artworks, architectural works and memorials. Landscape is the context and the source of inspiration for Ms. Lin’s art. She peers curiously at the landscape through a twenty-first century lens, merging rational and technological order with notions of beauty and the transcendental. Utilizing technological methods to study and visualize the natural world, Ms. Lin takes micro and macro views of the earth, sonar resonance scans, aerial and satellite mapping devices and translates that information into sculptures, drawings and environmental installations. Her works address how we relate and respond to the environment, and presents new ways of looking at the world around us. From recent environmental works such as Storm King Wavefield, Where the Land Meets the Sea and Eleven Minute Line to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where she cut open the land and polished its edges to create a history embedded in the earth, Ms. Lin has consistently explored how we experience the landscape. She has made works that merge completely with the terrain, blurring the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional space and set up a systematic ordering of the land tied to history, language, and time.

Her studio artwork has been shown in solo and group museum exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. Ms. Lin’s current exhibition Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes originated at Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and is the first to translate the scale and immersive capacity of her outdoor installations to the interior space of a museum. Maya Lin: Three Ways of Looking at the Earth, Selections from Systematic Landscapes was shown most recently at The Pace Gallery (formerly PaceWildenstein) in September 2009.

Ms. Lin is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York City.