Maya Lin

That's a very famous example.

That's Maya Lin.

She was a 21, I think she was 19 when she did the design.

She was a landscape architecture student from Yale, and she did this design, uh, for, as a project, class project, and she submitted it to the contest on a whim, and she won out of, I think, over 1,400 submissions.

When the wall was unveiled in 1982, a lot of people hated it.

A lot of vets took it as just another insult.

They called it the black gash of shame or a scar on the land, and then unfortunately, Maya Lin caught a lot of flack herself for being a young Asian American woman.

I don't care about artistic perceptions.

You kind of sit on the edge of this pond and just feel peace wash over you.

You can walk into the multi-faith chapel that Mrs. Edelman had Maya Lin design in the, uh, form of Noah's Ark-

Mm.

Um, and the place that will carry us all to safety and freedom.

The event pays tribute to the contributions and sacrifices of early Chinese-American pioneers while exploring the ambition and struggles of younger generations.

The opening concert featured The Rift, an opera that tells the story of architect Maya Lin, who realized her bold artistic vision with determination.

And that's the news.

I'm Zhao Ying.

Um, there's one artist, uh, who's dealing with the data centers that are coming in along the river.

And there, another, uh, Maya Lin, who did the Vietnam Memorial in DC, um, she did a wonderful installation at the Renwick Gallery of glass marbles in the shape, on the floor, in the shape of the Chesapeake Bay, and then with the marbles running up the wall, uh, representing the Susquehanna River.

Um, and so, and i- and each of the marbles represented a, a, a species of plant or animal that lives in the rivershed.

And so there are a lot of artists who are dealing specifically with just that aspect of the river because it is a threatened river.

And one of the things that happened, by the way, my friend Mark Lawrence has an excellent book on this, is that already the French and the British in the late 1940s were getting the Americans to kind of do what they wanted.

But what happens then is that when the French are gone, then the Communist insurgency in the North and the Viet Cong in the lead to this bloody series of just horrible years in which so many Americans and so many Vietnamese died, and they are commemorated by Maya Lin's wall in Washington with their names on it.

And that you can remember those scenes of the frantic end when the helicopters are pulling off the well-heeled and the well-connected from Saigon in the very end, and it was a lesson that was not learned, and sometimes that's the way that things go.

But that was nothing compared to Algeria, that was nothing at

Have you ever visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C.? It's a striking memorial dedicated to the Americans who died or remain missing from the Vietnam War.

The black granite wall, designed by Maya Lin, bears the names of those who died or remain missing, arranged chronologically.

You see yourself at the polished stone while you're viewing the names.

The memorial doesn't just show you the dead.

This last one takes us back to where we started, with land art, which really began to take root, pun intended, in the later 20th century, as a way to encourage audiences to consider their relationships to the natural world.

In Storm King Wavefield, American artist Maya Lin took an area once neglected by humans and reclaimed it as a habitat for native grasses.

These fields of tall vegetation also provide shelter for area wildlife, This is what you could call a site-specific artwork, meaning it was designed for a particular site and doesn't usually make any sense if you move it.

Lynn worked with a landscape designer and a horticulturalist to create what she calls a living sculpture, reshaping a gravel pit in New Windsor, New York, into these giant waves of earth.