Top 15 Maya Lin Quotes

I think art is personal to each artist, and so to me it is what my art always has been about. But that’s my choice as an artist. I don’t believe art necessarily has to be any one thing. In fact, if we all felt inclined to have to do that, I think it would be a disaster for art.

I would hope that artists can offer a different viewpoint, a different way of seeing the exact same data points, but maybe, because we can think a little bit outside of the norm, we can offer a new way of looking at it.

By second or third grade, I was doing my own thing. I still resent being told what to do in any way, shape, or form. I’m sure it’s clinical.

I have fought very, very hard to get past being known as the Monument Maker.

In art, I get to walk into my head and do whatever I want to do, to free up completely. That goes back to my roots in Athens, Ohio, my roots in nature and my feelings of connections to the environment, that everything is coalesced around being inspired by the natural world and reflecting that beauty out to others.

Every bowl we ate off was something he made by hand: stonewares connected to nature and natural colors and materials. And so I think our everyday lives was imbued with this very clean, modern, but very warm aesthetic, and that very much influenced me.

There are a couple of things out there that I really want to do. I’ll tell you one. I want to work in a landfill. I love things that involve adaptive reuse of really degraded places. The sad thing about our current landfills are, you can’t dig a hole into them, because heaven forbid, there’s all this toxic stuff in there. It’s not just that I want to work in a landfill. I would like to help rethink what a landfill could be. What if we didn’t put anything toxic in? What if we composted all our organic matter? So then it wouldn’t be dangerous to plant a tree in it, you wouldn’t have to cap it because you think there’s so much poison in there. What if we could recycle all our rare-earth metals and minerals? It’s a big ask. That’s something I want to do in my lifetime.

I tend to make models of a lot of my pieces. I end up making models, and the models get bigger, and bigger, and bigger. I call it the Christmas tree syndrome. You buy a Christmas tree outdoors, you think it’s too small, then you bring it inside and you have to lop two feet off because it’s way too big. If you’re working out of doors, you have to test actual scale, with a paper cutout, with a maquette at full scale, because you need it to feel intimate like a dining table. You have to scale it up just enough so that it will still feel intimate — so it won’t jump to monumental in scale. It has to be bigger than it would be inside because then it would get dwarfed. You can only do that by actually mocking it up.

It took a lot to understand and to thread a path that would allow me to develop in architecture, and develop my voice there, develop my voice in art. I wasn’t abandoning what I would call my interest in history and memory.

I think art is different. I think you have to be who you are. My art happens to be very integrally linked with my environmental concerns. But to be an artist, you have to be true to who you are.

I leave it up to the viewers. If it’s in a museum, if it’s in a gallery, usually I am going to point out something about a river right below your feet or right outside your window. I’m not going to scream it out. If you get a little curious, you can find a little bit more. At times my works are maybe to a fault subtle. For public works, maybe you won’t even notice I was here. I’m not trying to defeat or conquer nature.

It’s a bit unusual, as you said, to be working between the architecture, the art, and what I would say is a synthesis, the memorials—they’re problem solving, but it’s very symbolic. You get this triangle; I need to be balanced with those three. They’re all equally a part of who I am. I love how different they are, and yet they’re coming out the same thing, whatever it is.

I think I’ve always had an activist stance, yet at the same time, the other side of me—and this is where some people just don’t get it, or they’d prefer it if the work was a lot uglier, a lot louder—I have this personality where I just want to put something out that’s a fact and then let you interpret it. It’s almost as if you might barely notice it, you might walk right by it, but you have to pay attention.

I’ve always been pretty fixated on water. Maybe it’s because it exists in multiple states, and you can never understand it in nature as a fixed moment in time.

If you ever tried to analyze its shape, it's one of the most complex forms. Think about it, it's every compound curve. There's nothing symmetrical about it. It's about looking at something again and then appreciating it. I mean, nature, is so complex.