Maya Lin has maintained a careful balance in her career between art and architecture, creating a remarkable body of work that includes large-scale site-specific installations, intimate studio artworks, and architectural works.

In her large-scale environmental artworks, she has consistently explored how we experience and relate to the landscape. From her recent works such as Eleven Minute Line (2004, an earthen line 1600 feet long by 12 feet high, traversing a meadow in Sweden) and Flutter (2005, a 20,000 square foot sculpted earthwork commissioned for a federal courthouse in Miami) back to her very first—the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, where she cut open the land and polished its edges to create a history embedded in the earth—Maya Lin has made works that merge completely with the terrain, blurring the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional space and setting up a systematic ordering of the land that is tied to history, time, and language.

Her studio artwork has been shown in solo museum exhibitions in the US, Italy, Denmark, and Sweden. The exhibition Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes, which opened at Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery and is currently traveling, is the first to translate the scale and coherence of her outdoor installations to the interior space of a museum.

Ms. Lin’s architectural works have been critically acclaimed both nationally and internationally. Her recent architecture includes the Riggio-Lynch Chapel and Langston Hughes Library for the Children’s Defense Fund, an Environmental Learning lab at Manhattanville College, and a private residence in Colorado that was honored as one of Architecture Record’s Record Houses in 2006. Her architecture creates a dialog between the landscape and the architecture. She is committed to and advocates sustainable design practice in her works, often using sustainable and reclaimed materials, merging materials and design to establish a singular voice.

Currently Ms. Lin is working on, among others, the design for the Museum of Chinese in America’s new space in lower Manhattan; an 11 acre earthwork reclamation project at Storm King Art Center; a large-scale art installation for the California Academy of Sciences; and a multi-sited installation that spans the Columbia river system in the Pacific Northwest and that intertwines the history of Lewis and Clark with the history of the Native American Tribes that inhabit those regions – always with a critical eye toward the environmental changes that have rapidly occurred in the region.

A committed environmentalist, Lin has consistently focused on environmental issues and concerns, promoting sustainable building design in her architectural works while in her artworks asking us to pay closer attention to the natural world. She is working on what will become the last of her memorials, entitled “Missing,” which will focus on extinct and endangered species and places and will debut at the California Academy of Science on Earth Day 2009.