Maya Lin

Both What is Missing and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial were referred to by the White House in its press release that announced Lin as one of the 2016 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Nature and the environment have been central concerns for Lin in both her art and architecture: "As an artist I often work in series, and so for me, I wanted my last memorial to be on a subject that I have personally been concerned with and connected to since I was a child. The last memorial is "What Is Missing?" And encompasses multiple platforms, with temporary and permanent physical installations as well as an interactive online component." She has expressed her concerns for the goals of the Trump administration: "I think nature is resilient— if we protect it—and with my background I wanted to lend a voice to the incredible threat we are under from climate change and species and habitat loss."

In 2016, Lin was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

In 2013, Lin completed her largest work to date, A Fold in the Field. It was built from 105,000m cubic meters of earth, covering 3 hectares. It forms part of a private collection within a sculpture park, owned by Alan Gibbs, north of Auckland, New Zealand.

Since around 2010, Lin has been working on what she calls "her final memorial," the What Is Missing? Foundation, to commemorate the biodiversity that has been lost in the planet's sixth mass extinction. She aims to raise awareness about the loss of biodiversity and natural habitats by using sound, media, science, and art for temporary installations and a web-based project. What Is Missing? exists not in one specific site but in many forms and in many places simultaneously.

In 2009 Lin created the design of a building for the Museum of Chinese in America near New York City's Chinatown, Lin attached a personal significance to the project being a Chinese-related project, explaining that she wants her two daughters to "know that part of their heritage".

That same year, Lin completed Silver River, her first work of art in the Las Vegas Strip. It is part of a public fine art collection at MGM Mirage's CityCenter, which opened December 2009. Lin created an 84-foot (26 m) cast of the Colorado River made entirely of reclaimed silver. With the sculpture, Lin wanted to make a statement about water conservation and the importance of the Colorado River to Nevada in terms of energy and water. The sculpture is displayed behind the front desk of the Aria Resort and Casino.

In 2009, Lin was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.

In 2008, Lin completed a 30-ton sculpture called 2 × 4 Landscape, made of many pieces of wood, which was exhibited at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, in San Francisco. The sculpture itself is evocative of the swelling movement of water, which is juxtaposed with the dry materiality of the lumber pieces. According to Lin, 2 × 4 Landscape was her attempt to bring the experience of Wavefield (1995) indoors. The 2 × 4 pieces are also meant to be reminiscent of pixels, to evoke the "virtual or digital space that we are increasingly occupying."

In 2008, her projects included an installation, called Wave Field, at the Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York, near the Catskills. It is the center's first earthwork, spanning 4 acres of land, and is a larger version of her original Wave Field (1995) that focuses on the "fusion of opposites," comparing the motion of water to the material of the earth.

Notwithstanding the initial controversy, the memorial has become an important pilgrimage site for relatives and friends of the dead soldiers, many of whom leave personal tokens and mementos in memory of their loved ones. In 2007, an American Institute of Architects poll ranked the memorial No. 10 on a list of America's Favorite Architecture, and it is now one of the most visited sites on the National Mall. Furthermore, it now serves as a memorial for the veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. There is a collection with items left since 2001 from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which includes handwritten letters and notes of those who lost loved ones during these wars. There is also a pair of combat boots and a note with it dedicated to the veterans of the Vietnam war, that reads "If your generation of Marines had not come home to jeers, insults, and protests, my generation would not come home to thanks, handshakes and hugs."

In 2007, Lin installed Above and Below, an outdoor sculpture at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana. The artwork is made of aluminum tubing that has been electrolytically colored during a process called anodization.

In 2006, Lin completed Waterline, which is composed of aluminum tubing and paint. She describes the piece as a drawing instead of a sculpture. It is a to-scale representation of the Mid-Atlantic ridge, and it is installed so that viewers may walk under the underwater mountain range. There is a purposeful ambiguity to where the actual water line is in relation to the mountain range, to highlight viewers' relationship to the environment and their effect on bodies of water.

Also in 2006, Lin completed her Bodies of Water series, which included representations of three bodies of water, "The Black Sea," "The Caspian Sea," and "The Red Sea." Each sculpture is made of layers of birch plywood, and are to-scale representations of three endangered bodies of water. The sculptures are balanced on the deepest point of the sea. Lin wishes to call attention to the "unseen ecosystems" that people continue to pollute.

In 2005, she designed the new plaza that anchors the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine.

In 2005, Lin was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

In 2004, Lin completed an earthwork, Eleven Minute Line, in Sweden that was designed for the Wanås Foundation. Lin draws inspiration from the Serpent Mounds (Native American burial mounds) located in her home state, Ohio. It is meant to be a walkway for the viewers to experience, taking eleven minutes to complete. The earthwork is also inspired by Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.

In 2003, Lin was chosen to serve on the selection jury of the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. A trend toward minimalism and abstraction was noted among the entrants and the finalists as well as in the chosen design for the World Trade Center Memorial.

In 2002, Lin was elected Alumni Fellow of the Yale Corporation, the governing body of Yale University (upon whose campus sits another of Lin's designs, the Women's Table, designed to commemorate the role of women at Yale University), in an unusually public contest. Her opponent was W. David Lee, a local New Haven minister and graduate of the Yale Divinity School, who was running on a platform to build ties to the community with the support of Yale's unionized employees. Lin was supported by Yale President Richard Levin and other members of the Yale Corporation, and she was the officially endorsed candidate of the Association of Yale Alumni.

In 2000, Lin re-emerged in the public life with a book, Boundaries. Also in 2000, she agreed to act as the artist and architect for the Confluence Project, a series of outdoor installations at historical points along the Columbia River and Snake River in the states of Washington and Oregon. It is the largest and longest project that she has undertaken so far.

In 1999, Lin exhibited Il Cortile Mare (1998) of furniture design, maquettes and photos of works at the American Academy in Rome.

In 1995, Lin completed Wave Field, at the University of Michigan. Lin was inspired by both diagrams of fluids in motion and photographs of ocean waves. She was intrigued by the idea of capturing and freezing the motion of water, and she wished to capture that movement in the earth, rather than through photography. That was her first experience with earthworks.

In 1994, she was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. Its title comes from an address she gave at Juniata College in which she spoke of the monument design process in the origin of her work; "My work originates from a simple desire to make people aware of their surroundings and this can include not just the physical but the psychological world that we live in."

Lin, who now owns and operates Maya Lin Studio in New York City, has designed numerous projects, including the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (1989) and the Wave Field outdoor installation at the University of Michigan (1995).

Lin has been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Yale University, Harvard University, Williams College, and Smith College. In 1987 she was among the youngest to be awarded an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by Yale University.

In 1981, at 21 and still an undergraduate, Lin won a public design competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, to be built on the National Mall in Washington D.C. Her design, one of 1,422 submissions, specified a black granite wall with the names of 58,318 fallen soldiers carved into its face, to be v-shaped, with one side pointing toward the Lincoln Memorial and the other toward the Washington Monument. The memorial was completed in late October 1982 and dedicated in November 1982.

Lin has said that she did not have many friends when growing up, stayed home a lot, loved to study, and loved school. While still in high school she took independent courses at Ohio University where she learned to cast bronze in the school's foundry. She graduated in 1977 from Athens High School in The Plains, Ohio, after which she attended Yale University where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1981 and a Master of Architecture in 1986.

Maya Ying Lin (born October 5, 1959) is an American designer, architectural designer, and artist who works in sculpture and land art. She achieved national recognition as a 21-year-old undergraduate at Yale University when she won a national competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., considered to be one of the most influential memorials of the post-World War II period.

Maya Lin was born in Athens, Ohio. Her parents emigrated from China to the United States, her father in 1948 and her mother in 1949, and settled in Ohio before Lin was born. Her father, Henry Huan Lin, born in Fuzhou, Fujian, was a ceramist and dean of the Ohio University College of Fine Arts. Her mother, Julia Chang Lin, born in Shanghai, is a poet and a former professor of literature at Ohio University. She is the niece of Lin Huiyin, who was an American-educated artist and poet, and said to have been the first female architect in modern China. Lin Juemin and Lin Yin Ming, both of whom are among the 72 martyrs of the Second Guangzhou uprising, were cousins of her grandfather. Lin Chang-min, a Hanlin of Qing dynasty and the emperor's teacher, was the father of Lin Hui-yin and great-grandfather of Maya Lin.