Maya Lin is the rare wunderkind who continues to astonish. At forty-nine, she is as groundbreaking as she was when, as a twenty-one-year-old Yale undergraduate, she saw her radically understated design for the future Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., chosen in an open competition.
Storm King Wavefield, Lin's latest project, covers eleven acres at the Storm King Art Center, in Mountainville, New York, and presents an amazing twist on the 1960s Earthworks art movement. The seven undulating, grass-covered hills, roughly 300 to 370 feet long and ten to eighteen feet high, blend so seamlessly into the natural setting that it's hard to believe they're man-made.
"I'm not an artist who puts objects in a landscape," says Lin, who has also designed buildings. (Her latest, the Museum of Chinese in America, opens next month in Manhattan's Chinatown.) "I don't like to be predictable." She does, however, like to develop concepts over time; this is the latest, and by far the largest, of three wave-themed pieces she's created (the earlier works are on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor and at the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Miami).
Lin has sited her mesmerizing hills on a distant part of the Storm King property that was once an active gravel pit. Distant but not remote: unlike Robert Smithson's epic Spiral Jetty (1970), which hugs the shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake, Wavefield is an easy ninety-minute drive from New York City. stormking.org.
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