Maya Lin Awarded Van Alen Prize
Van Alen Institute announced yesterday that Maya Lin (Season 2) has been awarded the New York Prize Senior Fellowship. Appointed Senior Fellows are accomplished thinkers, artists and practitioners who have a demonstrated record of exceptional work and are identified as leaders in their fields. During her tenure as Senior Fellow, Lin will further develop Missing - a project she describes as her “last memorial” that will “focus attention on species and places that have gone extinct or will most likely disappear within our lifetime.”
Now in its second year, the New York Prize Fellowship was established to bring practitioners and scholars to Van Alen Institute’s headquarters in New York City to pursue and present advanced independent projects on the most significant issues shaping the conception, design and use of public space today.
U.S. Embassy Makes Olympic Rings
These big metallic tulips aren’t just going to be on view in Spain, where they are permanently installed along the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s riverside façade, above. An edition of Tulips by Jeff Koons, as well as new work by Art:21 artists Louise Bourgeois, Cai Guo-Qiang, Martin Puryear, and Maya Lin are included on the checklist of 18 contemporary Chinese and American artists that will on view when the massive SOM-designed American embassy opens in Beijing, just before the start of the 2008 summer Olympics. Many of the pieces are either new commissions or site-specific works purchased by the State Department. According to The Art Newspaper, the State Department calculates the budget it will spend on art based on a new building’s square footage, and therefore $800,000 will be spent on art for the Beijing project — the largest sum ever splurged on a new US embassy.
Maya Lin and More at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
Systematic Landscapes, a traveling exhibition of work by Season 1 artist Maya Lin, is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through June 30, 2008. The exhibition focuses on a trio of large-scale sculptural installations—2×4 Landscape, Water Line, and Blue Lake Pass (pictured above)—that wed the artist’s deep interest in forces and forms of nature with her long-standing investigation into sculptural forms. Watch a video featuring the installation of 2×4 Landscape at MCA San Diego here.
In a recent Los Angeles Times article, which took the MCA San Diego exhibition as its starting point, Lin discussed her current project for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Calling it her “last memorial,” the commissioned piece will grieve for the animals, birds and plants driven into extinction—and warn of the urgency of acting now to halt the devastation. Envisioning the piece as a “multisite chronicle, including photography and video, at places around the world and with a commemorative list of names of extinct species,” it is scheduled to launch on Earth Day in April 2009.
MCA San Diego’s attention to nature and environmental issues in contemporary art continues this August with Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet. Art 21 artists Mark Dion (Season 4) and Ann Hamilton (Season 1) are included in this collaborative multi-year exhibition project that sent eight leading artists to UNESCO World Heritage sites around the globe to create new work informed and inspired by their experiences. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, Rigo 23, Dario Robleto, Diana Thater and Xu Bing will also participate. Human/Nature is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, in partnership with the international conservation organization Rare.
The Confluence Project looks for volunteers
Season 1 artist Maya Lin’s Confluence Project is looking for volunteers during June and October 2008 to complete a trail at Sandy River Delta in Oregon, which leads to Lin’s Bird Blind installation. Lin’s Confluence Project was born in 2000, when she was asked to create a series of installations along the Columbia River basin to commemorate the bicentennial of the journey of the Corps of Discovery, the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806, which ran from Chief Timothy Park to Cape Disappointment. Maya Lin was asked by local Native American tribes to rethink the meaning of the expedition by creating art pieces on the same trails that were minutely described by these travelers 200 years ago.
If you are interested in collaborating in this ongoing project or to see Maya Lin’s online video explaining the project herself, visit www.confluenceproject.org
Maya Lin interview at the Contemporary
Here is an interview that the Contemporary’s Director of Education Kathryn Adamchick did with Maya Lin this season. The conversation was captured during Maya’s visit to St. Louis to install her exhibition Systematic Landscapes. What I appreciate about Art:21 is that it gives the viewers direct access to the artists. The value in being able to hear and to observe an artist at work or play is the greatest perk in being involved in contemporary art. As a non-collecting institution, and due to the ephemeral nature of our work, we find it crucial to document the exhibitions and even the installation process. Traditionally this was done through catalogs and photographs. With the new technology like podcasting and blogging, our ability to access information about artists and their work is easier than ever for those with internet access. The Art:21 series, in addition to its blog and the website, allows the contemporary art audience access to vast amounts of information on artists of our time.The exhibition Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes was organized by the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle. The exhibition featured among others, three monumental installations: 2×4 Landscape, Water Line, and Blue Lake Pass. Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis also commissioned a piece from Maya Lin titled Pin River, based upon the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Maya also created a special edition exclusively for the Contemporary based on the Mississippi River which can be viewed here: http://www.contemporarystl.org/artistseditions.phpMaya Lin is internationally recognized for her Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., which she designed when she was a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale University. Dedicated in 1982, the monument is widely recognized as one of the most important public art piece of this century. But since then, Lin has been justly celebrated for a remarkable body of work that includes sculpture, earthworks, architecture, landscape design, and public monuments. She continues to freely cross the boundaries of art, architecture, and design.
Maya Lin’s Systematic Landscapes in St. Louis
This Friday, the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis will open Systematic Landscapes by Season 1 artist Maya Lin. The exhibition, organized by the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle (which featured Lin’s Art21 segment in the exhibition), shows new sculptures, drawings and installations from the artist.
Maya Lin is internationally recognized for her Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., which changed the language and form of commemorative sculpture. Yet the diversity of Lin’s work, which ranges freely across the boundaries of art, architecture, and design, establishes her as an artist that resists any categorization.
As she explains in an interview with Art21:
“The mediums I use range widely, from broken glass to water to granite. And I think formalistically, each time out with these large scale works, they can look very different. But there are some very strong underlying ideas that go throughout the works. One of them is time, one of them is an idea about landscape and the earth, or natural states or phenomena.”
Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes is centered around three monumental installations, 2×4 Landscape, Water Line, and Blue Lake Pass, each of which puts the viewer into a distinctive relationship with the scale and shape of the land. Since the pieces are massive, they invite the visitor literally to become a part of her invented and real landscapes walking under, upon, and through them. Lin explains that these pieces are meant to challenge the means by which we perceive landscapes in the twenty-first century, the era of digital photos and satellite maps on the Internet.
The museum also commissioned the first work from Maya Lin in the public space of St. Louis with her new sculptural work Pin River, based upon the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.
As part of the public programs associated with the show, “Between Art and Architecture: An Evening with Maya Lin,” a public lecture by the artist presented by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, will take place on September 6.
Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis will run through December 30, 2007. Read more about the exhibition here. View more images from the Henry’s exhibition here.
