Women of the Millenium: Maya Lin, b. 1959, Artist
Chive Mynde
She was only 21 and an architecture student at Yale when this Ohioan
entered a competition to design a Vietnam War memorial for Washington,
D.C. When her striking design won, many veterans sputtered with macho
outrage that its creator was a young woman of Asian extraction. They
denounced Lin with racial slurs and called her design "insulting"
because it wasn't the traditional statue-on-a-podium of soldiers.
Nonetheless, her enormous open chevron composed of two polished black
granite slabs, completed in 1982 and carved with the names of all
57,000 fallen Americans, has become the most visited public artwork in
America. Lin has since designed other moving monuments, such as the
Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala. Her artwork, landscape
designs and architecture can be seen around the U.S.
by Pat Lynden
http://www.women.com/
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Science is not belief, but the will to find out.