An image of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C
Maya Lin was born on October 5, 1959. She was national
recognized at age 21 for her design for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C.
She also is the creator of Civil Rights Memorial Center, Museum of Chinese of
America. After the Vietnam there was contest for designs to represent all the
veterans that had fallen in that war. So, Maya being an architecture and
sculpturing major at the university of Yale at the time when ahead and
submitted a design. The relevancy of this was important for several reasons but
the main reason is present day this monument is invaluable in both value and
memory. But at the time not everyone was for the creation and building of the
VVMF because the funding being pushed towards the memorial could’ve been spent
helping several veterans that needed help. At the time there were no names on
any of the designs and at the time if that wasn’t the case she believed that
her design wouldn’t have been chosen. Once getting to this point she started
going under fire simply for the fact that she was young student of Asian descent
and that she was a woman. Others didn’t like how simply the design and felt it
was a minimalistic design and was not paying enough homage for their service
and sacrifice. One person even testified in front of the Commission of Fine
Arts (CFA) against the design, and he was a former supporter of the design,
veteran and lawyer Tom Carhart. Going as far as saying that “One needs no
artistic education to see this design for what it is, a black trench that scars
the Mall. Black walls, the universal color of shame and sorrow and degradation.”
Which was controversial because Vietnam was a war where color did not play a
role in general, and so the argument that the color of the walls being black
was invalid and held no meaning positive or negative. After a couple debates Maya
had moved to Washington to be able to have control over her design as it was
being built. But at the end of the day with all of the controversial feelings
and debates, one thing is certain the VVM is priceless and a timeless memorial
created by one who will go down in history.
http://www.vvmf.org/the-controversy
To read about Maya Lin was very interesting. She went through many struggles to build this design. I hate the fact that she was discriminated against. The color of the wall was interesting to me. It’s not like the wall needs to be bright with color since this was not a happy time in history. I think it is great that she was able to design this though.
ReplyDeleteShe was able to be influential at such a young age. Through the struggles she was able to show what she believed and stand up for herself when our country was struggling as a whole
ReplyDelete