1
This essay is based on interviews with Maya Lin conducted in the winter and spring of 2002; it was published in the New
Yorker
on July 1, 2002, before any designs for the World Trade Center site had been made public. The essay has not been updated.
After it appeared, two of the leaders of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, John Wheeler and Robert Doubek, wrote to the New Yorker to object to, essentially, the statement that the veterans had “betrayed” Lin. Wheeler and Doubek played honorable roles in the construction of the memorial, and almost everyone (including Lin) agrees that without some compromise, Lin’s wall would not have been built. But their letters reflected exactly the mentality about public art that was one of the themes of the essay: having paid for what they called the “concept,” the veterans felt free to mix and match as they saw fit in order to accommodate various non-artists who had an interest in the site. They did not see adding a statue and a fifty-foot flagpole as emendations significant enough to require even notifying the original artist. When the compromise was announced, the president of the American Institute of Architects, Robert M. Lawrence, called it “a breach of faith … with the designer who won the competition” (see Paul Goldberger, “Vietnam Memorial: Questions of Architecture,”
New York Times
, October 7, 1982, C25).
2
Maya Lin,
Boundaries
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
3
See Wilma Fairbanks,
Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China’s Architectural Past
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); and Jonathan Spence,
The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895–1980
(New York: Viking, 1981), 154–56, 161–65, 174, 207. Information about Julia Chang’s family and her experiences is from my interview with Julia Lin, March 2002.
4
See Robert L. Thorp and Richard Ellis Vinograd,
Chinese Art and Culture
(New York: Abrams, 2001), 395.
5
See Tom Finkelpearl,
Dialogues in Public Art
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 121.
6
In the documentary
Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision
, dir. Freida Lee Mock (American Film Foundation, 1995). On the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the controversy over Lin’s design, see Mock’s film; Jan C. Scruggs and Joel L. Swerdlow,
To Heal a Wound: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
(New York: Harper and Row, 1986); Mary Eleanor McCombie, “Art and Policy: The National Endowment for the Arts’ Art in Public Places Program, 1967–1980” (dissertation, University of Texas, 1992), 230–40; Daniel Abramson, “Maya Lin and the 1960s: Monuments, Time Lines, and Minimalism,”
Critical Inquiry
22 (1996): 679—709; and Wilbur J. Scott, The Politics of Readjustment: Vietnam Veterans Since the War (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993), 129–62.
7
Peter Tauber, “Monument Maker,” New York Times Magazine, February 24, 1991, 54
8
Charles Gandee, “The Other Side of Maya Lin,” Vogue, April 1995, 403.