Article Options
Teaching Resources

Maya Lin: Art & Environment

Contemporary American artist Maya Lin uses art to get us thinking about how humans interact with their world

April 2012

Maya Lin (b. 1959), Eleven Minute Line, 2004. Sweden. Photos: Anders Norsell, Wanas Foundation.

How has Maya Lin altered the landscape to create this sculpture? How does it look different when viewed from above rather than at ground level (see insets below)?

Artists sometimes make statements about their personal beliefs through their work. They create artworks with thought-provoking messages about social, political, cultural, or environmental issues. In this issue, you’ll read about several contemporary artists doing just that.

Maya Lin uses her artwork to shed light on environmental issues. Best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., Lin has spent her career making art, architecture, and monuments, all inspired by the surrounding landscape. Lin hopes her art will help viewers develop a greater appreciation for their world.

Earth as Art

Maya Lin (b. 1959), Eleven Minute Line, 2004. Sweden. Photos: Anders Norsell, Wanas Foundation.

How does this sculpture change as the seasons change?

Lin’s Eleven Minute Line (above) is a giant earthwork built into the Swedish landscape in 2004. Lin was inspired to create the piece by prehistoric burial mounds near her home in Ohio. The piece explores the relationship between a two-dimensional line drawing and the viewer’s experience walking that line in a three-dimensional landscape.

It takes about 11 minutes to walk the length of the sculpture. At different points along the path, visitors are walking up or down an incline or standing on top of or beside the piece. The viewer’s experience is constantly changing as he or she views the sculpture and surrounding land from different locations. The sculpture also seems different as the seasons change. How might a sculpture like this encourage viewers to think about the environment?

Recycled Landscapes, Toy Asteroids, 2009. Photo: Courtesy of Salon 94.

How does Lin use vending-machine toys and their containers to make a statement about garbage?

 

Trash to Treasure

In Lin’s 2009 series Recycled Landscapes (above and at right), the artist turned discarded plastic toys into statement-making sculptures about our world. Lin collected these found objects, which might otherwise have ended up in a landfill, and turned them into art. She assembled the toys into spheres, the shape of the Earth. She uses them to ask viewers to think about the things they buy and consider what happens to those things after they are thrown away. Do you think these sculptures are effective?

Reflecting History

Lin’s most recent project is her most ambitious yet. In The Confluence Project, the artist is attempting to connect hundreds of years of history by drawing attention to the land and water. At seven points along 300 miles of the Columbia River basin, Lin and a team of landscape architects are creating site-specific (setting is part of the work) viewing platforms where visitors can reflect on the ecology and history of each place.

The sites follow the route of 19th-century explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their historic journey from St. Louis, Missouri, west along the river to the Pacific Ocean. The travelers wrote about the plant and animal life as well as the cultures of the Native American groups they encountered. Lin has completed work at five of seven sites. Each invites visitors to think about the confluence, or connection, among the past, present, and future. 

“ I give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That’s art to me.” —Maya Lin

Media
Sculpture
Elements
Ideas
Features
Spotlight
Text-to-Speech