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My dad was dean of fine arts at the university. I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was using the university as a playground.

Maya Lin

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Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
Arts
University
Dad
Foundry
Using
Playground
Fine
Playgrounds
Artist
Bronze
Art
Dean
School
Casting

More quotes by Maya Lin

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An artist fights to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision. Art is and should be the act of an individual willing to say something new, something not quite familiar.
Maya Lin
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I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.
Maya Lin
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My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
Maya Lin
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A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time.
Maya Lin
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Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.
Maya Lin
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I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.
Maya Lin
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You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
Maya Lin
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I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist.
Maya Lin
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I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.
Maya Lin
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Math, it's a puzzle to me. I love figuring out puzzles.
Maya Lin
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I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up.
Maya Lin
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I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.
Maya Lin
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It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.
Maya Lin
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If we forget what used to be, then we’ve lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings.
Maya Lin
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The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
Maya Lin
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I always say I'm no different than a 19th-century landscape painter, it's just that we have these incredible tools to look at the Earth and look at the world around us differently.
Maya Lin
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You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.
Maya Lin
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I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It's like a thread of life.
Maya Lin
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It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public.
Maya Lin
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You really can't function as a celebrity. Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect. I'm an artist. I make things.
Maya Lin