Maya Lin
Talin Kraft
As the Covid restrictions ease, Carnegie Hall returns with its free summer outside concerts program, which feels incredibly nice. A series of concerts in Madison Square Park takes place in the middle of Ghost Forest, a project by a prominent contemporary artist Maya Lin. It consists of about 50 dead cedar trees, which are currently endangered on the East Coast.
While these concerts soothe the soul, the dead trees installation is a striking and grim reminder of environmental vulnerability and climate crisis. It’s accompanied by an audio recording (Ghost Forest Soundscape) of the sounds of the native species of birds and animals once common to Manhattan.
While looking at the Ghost Forest installation, I was thinking about other Maya Lin’s projects I was lucky enough to encounter. She has an impressive range of artistic ideas - from environmental and feminist issues to engineering and architectural themes to land-art. Here’s a few of her works.
Eclipsed Time sculpture was installed on the ceiling of Penn Station between LIRR concourse and 2&3 lines subway entrance (sadly, it’s now removed) and it’s a brilliant piece of engineering (at least in theory, because it hasn’t been working for a long time). It’s a clock where the time is displayed by light and shadow, evoking the times when clocks were dependent on the Sun. As Maya Lin explains, “a solid disk hangs between the light source and a stationary glass disk. Light shines through the glass disk, illuminating the rotunda below. The solid disk travels from east to west and back. An eclipse is created at midnight, as the two disks are aligned and only a penumbra of light shines around the aligned circles. The cycle is repeated daily.”
For many years, I saw this clock twice a day as I used to work in midtown. Most people had no idea, never looked up. I loved it.
Storm King WaveField at the Storm King Art Center in upstate NY. It’s amazing. It’s built next to a small hill, so you can sit on that hill and look at the waves. The waves are like sea, only it’s earth and grass, everything is still but for an occasional bird, the experience is surreal.
Sounding Stones in NYC are located on a tiny pedestrian line behind NY County Supreme Court, between Pearl and Worth Street. It’s such an unusual place. Right around a corner there’s the hustle and bustle of the Civic Center neighborhood, but this little, quiet, tree-lined street is so serene. There are four granite blocks that have been cut through and contain water fountains. The blocks are all different size, so the water sounds different in each of them.
The Sounding Stones project was a step towards a series of the works that also involve stones and water. Apparently, Maya Lin has a special love for water tables, literally. She created at least three, all very different.
Under the Laurentide at Brown University. This water table recreates the submerged landscape of the waterways around Providence.
The Women’s table at Yale University is commemorating women at Yale. The spiraling line of numbers indicates how many female students were registered every year. Yale was founded in 1701; the earliest date without a zero is 1873. Maya Lin herself is a Yale alumna - she received her BA in 1981 and Master of Architecture in 1986.
Einstein’s Table and The Princeton Line at Princeton University. (pictures are coming)