“Maya Lin: Mappings,” a collection of Lin’s works commenting on the relationship between humans and the environment, will be on exhibition at the Smith College Art Museum through Aug. 7.
The exhibit is organized around four thematic axes: water, land, ice and climate change. Through materials such as steel pins, marble and bound atlases, Lin experiments with the perception of natural elements. As Aprile Gallant, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs at the SCMA said, “The core focus of Maya Lin’s work is the relationship between people and the environment: her artworks are transmitters of scientific information with an emotional resonance.”
Environmental concerns have been central to Lin’s practice since its beginnings. As a student at Yale, she dedicated herself to environmental activism. Later, an emphasis on the “balance and tension between the man-made and the natural” would be central to her memorial work.
In Mappings, these concerns find a number of new embodiments. One of the centerpieces of the exhibit, “What Is Missing?”, which Lin has called her last memorial, deploys interactive technology to convey the impact of climate change across the planet. The artwork grapples with the concept of baseline shift, a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment due to a lack of past information. By preserving data about the past and present state of the world, her work makes sense of the vast devastation humans are bringing about the natural world.
Born in 1959, Lin was brought into national relevance when she won a national design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. She has worked as a designer and sculptor, and one of her latest architectural works was the remodelation of the Neilson Library.
Her connection to Smith is part of a family legacy. In 1949, as Mao Zedong’s Communist army entered Shanghai, her mother, Julia, received an acceptance letter to transfer to Smith. As the city was being invaded, Lin’s mother left the country on a fishing boat with two $10 bills and her acceptance letter sewn inside a dress collar.
In an interview with the New York Times, Lin said that the construction of the Neilson Library felt pressing to her because “If [Julia] had not gotten that scholarship to go to Smith, she wouldn’t have gotten out of China, which meant she wouldn’t have met my dad. Poof! In an instant, I don’t exist.”
The structure of the new Neilson Library not only reflects this commitment to the college but also displays her interest in developing a more holistic relationship between humans and the environment. Upper-floor windows, for example, have been “laced with an ultraviolet webbing pattern — invisible to human eyes, but not to flying birds that might otherwise crash into the clear glass.” A sculpture of the Mill River made of recycled marbles remains a permanent part of the library’s central area, and materials from the previous building were integrated into the new Neilson.
“Maya Lin’s work is very attuned and responsive to the environment,” Gallant said. “She is able to take really complex information and make it personal. The ways she looks at things are very intuitive, but they also speak to many different people.”
