National Medal of Arts

Maya Lin: The Quiet Power of Design

When Maya Lin was just twenty-one, her quiet vision changed how a nation remembers. As an undergraduate at Yale, she submitted a class project to a national design competition. It was for a memorial for Vietnam War veterans. Her entry, a sleek wedge of polished black granite etched with the names of more than 58,000 fallen soldiers, was unlike anything the public had seen. Its simplicity sparked debate, but what some called too stark soon became one of America’s most intense and healing monuments.

Lin grew up in Athens, Ohio, surrounded by creativity and intellect. Her mother, a poet, and her father, a ceramic artist and art school dean, taught her to think across disciplines which became the foundation of her career. She often says her work lives “between boundaries – science and art, art and architecture, East and West.” That in-between space is where her designs find their quiet power, inviting reflection rather than demanding it.