Maya Lin Explores Global Warming

Although the new Maya Lin show at the de Young won’t open until late in the month, should you stroll through the museum’s Wilsey Court after October 6, you’ll get a preview of the direction Lin’s work has taken in the quarter century since her Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated. At first, it might not seem a huge departure: The artwork slowly taking shape there is also starkly geometric, a single, massive sine wave of a hill, 2,500 square feet in area, being constructed from thousands of pieces of two-by-fours. “It had too big a footprint to fit in our downstairs gallery space,” says the exhibition’s presenting curator, Karin Breuer. “Maya was actually delighted about that—when she saw the courtyard and that big empty space, you could see her eyes open wide.”

But rather than trying to unite, with black granite, a mourning, divided nation, the 48-year-old Lin is now exploring global warming, topographical change, species extinction—in short, the forces of man upon nature. “Her explorations of landscape and geologic phenomena are really—this is going to sound cliché—really deep,” Breuer says. “She picks a spot and comes up with ideas to transform an outdoor concept into an indoor one—bringing landscape into architecture and blending them into this work, which we would call ‘sculpture.’” The exhibition, “Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes,” has three such pieces at its heart: the aforementioned 2x4 Landscape, a suspended wire sculpture called Water Line that traces a patch of the Atlantic seabed and Blue Lake Pass, a model of a Colorado mountain range chopped into chunks.

These three pieces are anchoring the show at all of its stops—Seattle, St. Louis, San Diego and, after SF, the Corcoran Gallery in DC—but Lin has made site-specific pieces for each venue as well. In Seattle, it was a “pin-river sculpture” of the Columbia River; in San Diego, she poured liquid silver into a crack in the gallery floor, à la Andy Goldsworthy. Here, she’s re-creating the Tuolumne River—pre-Hetch Hetchy Reservoir—using thousands of pins stuck into a wall. “This is the kind of controversial thing that she loves, the whole concept of man changing nature and flooding a wilderness to provide water for the city,” Breuer says. And there’s one more element that none of the other museums hosting the show can boast: At the new California Academy of Sciences, Lin’s installation Where the Land Meets the Sea has just gone in, and the de Young’s exhibition will include a section devoted to that piece as well. It is, as Breuer puts it, “a kind of glad-to-have-you, and thanks-for-incorporating-art-in-your-building” gesture. Welcome to the neighborhood.

“Maya Lin: Systematic landscapes” Oct. 25–Jan. 18, 2009, de Young Museum, thinker.org