Artist and architect Maya Lin, born in 1959, achieved national recognition at the age of 21 while still an undergraduate at Yale University when her design was chosen in a national competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. It is considered one of the most influential memorials of the post-World War II period.
Her multi-sited work, What Is Missing, debuted in 2009 with a sound and media sculpture installation at the California Academy of Sciences, an investigation of habitat loss and the biodiversity crisis. And she has set up a web site of the same name of which she says, “It’s not to get you depressed, but to give you a sense of wonderment of what the world has had. We do these ecological timelines of specific waterways in cities. The minute you legislate, biodiversity comes back. So we link to ‘What can we do?’ and ‘What’s being done?’ We try to pull together the best conservation successes and the worst failures. And on the right side of the homepage there’s an info button, and if you press it, you get all these ‘What can you do’s’ and what we’re ultimately building toward is a blueprint.”
In an interview in whitewall.art in 2016 Lin goes on to say, “There is a phenomenon that scientists refer to as ‘shifting baselines.’ We actually don’t recall what we’ve lost because with every generation we accept a lower and lower amount of biodiversity. Our baselines keep shifting, and we don’t realize that a cod was bigger than a man in 1895. We don’t realize that the settlers, when they first came into the harbor, came across sturgeon that would collide with their boats, they were so powerful. Or that lobsters were six feet tall, oysters were a foot in diameter.”
Another project worth noting has been the Confluence Project along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. Over twenty years ago, she was commissioned by a group of arts patrons and tribal leaders of the Columbia River Plateau and the Pacific Northwest to create a major work of public art in remembrance of the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark’s 1804–1806 journey to the Pacific Ocean.
The Vancouver Land Bridge, just north of the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington, was a multi-artist project designed by architect Johnpaul Jones with consultation from Lin. It sits where the Hudson’s Bay Company stood as the first European trading post in the Pacific Northwest. Lewis and Clark camped there, and Fort Vancouver was built there 20 years later.
She goes on to say in the whitewall interview, “What I’m building for the next two years is called Greenprint. If we took the entire world’s population of seven billion and looked at the density of Manhattan, the amount of space we take up is the state of Colorado. I’m not trying to compete with what the scientists are doing, but maybe as an artist I can get us to re-think the issues. Is population the problem, or is it land use and resource consumption? And you know the answer. So we’re going to map out a lot of these scenarios.”
And in Artforum she says, “…the issues have to be made relevant to us, and they have to be both global and local. That’s what What Is Missing? is trying to do by asking people to share personal stories. We are getting people to reflect and engage on a personal level—getting people to connect back to nature—as well as showing what each one of us can do to help and how you can help environmental groups at both a local and a global level. I’m not trying to be anything other than a lens that points out certain things. Science fiction and art have always imagined the future before the rest of us got there. For example, when you evoke an image that the entire world population—living at the density of Manhattan—would fit into Colorado, the initial response from a person is, That’s it?? Moreover, to mitigate climate change would cost $700 billion annually—and that is approximately what we spend on cigarettes and a fraction of what we spend on defense budgets. It’s an idea that shifts our thinking patterns. We require a little reconditioning, little brain exercises that might help us think this is solvable. The question is, Will we move on it? It’s still to be seen. But it’s eminently solvable. With the scale of us and the scale of what we do, we can put this in check.”
And now…