TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110689/p90

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                                                                                PROFILE, Page 90

First She Looks Inward


Architect MAYA LIN'S Viet Nam memorial proved to be a powerful
emotional reminder. Now she has created another

By Jonathan Coleman


    Maya Lin was living on New York City's Lower East Side when
she received a call from a man in Louisiana in late February
1988. Edward Ashworth, a member of the board of the Southern
Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, said he was sorry to
disturb her at home but hoped she would seriously consider the
reason for his call: he wanted to know if she would be open to
the idea of creating a memorial to those who had given their
lives in the struggle for civil rights. Since she had designed
the much celebrated Viet Nam Veterans Memorial, he was certain
that she was the right, perhaps only, person to do this. As with
Viet Nam, there had never been such a memorial.

    "I had told myself," Lin says, "that I was not going to
design any more war memorials, but this wasn't that. The idea
sounded interesting, and I told him that it would be fine to
send me something."

    For Maya Lin, the process of creating the Civil Rights
Memorial will not only culminate with its dedication in
Montgomery this Sunday but will almost certainly thrust her,
against her basic wish that her work speak for itself, into the
public eye once more.

    Seven years have passed since the Viet Nam memorial was
dedicated in Washington. Seven years since the heated, at times
ugly, controversy that swirled around the design and its
designer seemed to evaporate, in an instant, once the nation
could witness for itself the overwhelming effect those two walls
of polished black granite have on all who visit them, place
flags and flowers beside them and touch the more than 58,000
names inscribed on them.

    Lin's deceptively simple design -- entry No. 1,026 in a
contest she never dreamed she would win -- had enabled America
not only finally to confront the outcome of the Viet Nam War but
also to begin the long process of healing. The memorial made it
possible for the country to come together and honor those who
had served -- those who had died and those who had come home to
anything but a hero's welcome. Lin was proud of her achievement,
yet disillusioned by the negative reactions her design had
initially elicited ("a black gash of shame," to cite one), by
the battles she had to wage to keep the "additions" of a flag
and statue far away from the memorial, and by the fact that even
her Chinese heritage was maligned. Young (she was a 21-year-old
senior at Yale when her design was chosen), by her own admission
naive, and secretly terrified that perhaps she had accomplished
all she was going to accomplish, she left Washington with a
brutal understanding of the incompatibility of politics and art.

    Her feeling of terror quickly passed. The short answer to
the question "What ever happened to Maya Lin?" -- a question
that makes her bristle -- is that she has been obsessively doing
what she likes to do most: she has been working. But what she
has done, she has done quietly, as is her nature, shirking the
celebrity others might have embraced.

    "You really can't function as a celebrity," she says,
sitting at her drafting table, where she likes to sketch and
talk at the same time. "Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an
architect, I'm an artist, I make things. I just love the fact
that I can make a work and put it out there and walk away from
it and then look at it like everyone else."

    Her enthusiasm for that work is infectious. In person, she
is shy yet affable, serious but quick to smile, and full of
energy; she doesn't so much walk as dart. Her private life,
centered on a Bowery loft with the sculptor Peter Boynton and
a cat named Sam, is something she guards fiercely. Her black
hair, which once extended to her waist, has been cut short for
quite some time, and her dark eyes draw you to her with their
intensity. She dresses simply -- T-shirts and sneakers whenever
possible -- is self-conscious about her youthful appearance (she
turned 30 in October, and had looked forward to it for months)
and prefers reading a Borges short story to anything that might
be on television.

    As Lin grew up, one of the subjects she excelled in was
mathematics. That skill not only led her toward architecture
but also shapes her outlook on work. "If you present me with a
problem, and if I like it and think I can work with it, I'll do
it." That's an understatement. In point of fact, she finds
herself driven to solve it, immediately.

    In the seven years since she left Washington, some of which
she spent briefly at Harvard and then back at Yale, getting a
master's, those "problems" have included the renovation of a
Victorian house in Connecticut; the design of a stage set in
Philadelphia; a corporate logo for financier Reginald Lewis; an
open-air gathering place at Juniata College in Pennsylvania;
and, soon, a "playful park" outside the Charlotte Coliseum in
North Carolina (using trees shaped like spheres), and for the
Long Island Rail Road section of New York's Pennsylvania
Station, a glass-block ceiling, featuring fragmented, elliptical
rings. In addition, there is her sculpture, which has been part
of an exhibit at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City.
Combining lead (which she loves for its malleability and its
"seductive" quality) and broken safety glass, her pieces achieve
her goal of being "beautiful but not pretty, strong and tough,
yet not intimidating." They are very direct, in the same way she
is.

    Even though this array of projects suggests an artist who
refuses to specialize, who doesn't see limits, who, perhaps
most important, doesn't want to be forever categorized as the
"designer of the Viet Nam memorial," her approach to her work
is intrinsically the same as it has always been. When she looks
at a site, she says, she considers more than the mere
physicality of it. She considers the "emotional and
psychological context" of the place -- the people, the
background, the history. Then there is the form itself.
"Tactility," she says suddenly, with such emphasis that it
suggests the essence of her perceptions. "Immediate sensations
of material. Things are minimal in my vocabulary, so that means
everything counts. Light counts. Sound counts. Height
differences count.

    "You don't see a piece of sculpture without touching it,"
she emphasizes. "When I taught a class at Phillips Exeter, I
told my students to close their eyes and feel an object, feel
its proportion. Then I would take it away and make them draw it.
If you create something unusual, people will take the next step
in."

    She pauses, seems lost in thought, then begins again,
determined to make her point. "I just don't think we give
enough credit to our public. The Viet Nam memorial was first
seen as some sort of elitist statement. It's like you see it
before you really see it. But if you don't have preconceived
notions, the presence of the object will touch you in some way,
and you'll be in dialogue with it. I mean, what do you do with
people like Tom Wolfe? His fear of modern art is sad. He must
have been flogged with a Brancusi somewhere along the way."

    Lin concedes that her artistic vision is "distinctly Asian"
in its stark simplicity and virtual requirement to "look
inward." If it, and her almost single-minded devotion to work,
can be traced to anything, it is to the close-knit, ascetic
world of her family. Her parents fled China just before the
Communist takeover in 1949 and eventually settled in Athens,
Ohio, where her father, a ceramicist, taught for many years at
Ohio University, and where her mother, a poet, still does. Her
older brother, Tan, is also a poet. Lin's family in China, which
included an architect and a famous lawyer who worked for
progressive causes, has been described in Jonathan Spence's The
Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution,
1895-1980.

    Since she didn't date, didn't wear makeup (still doesn't)
and took college classes while still in high school, she didn't
have a typical American adolescence, but says she didn't care.
From childhood on, she could go "for hours and days just playing
by myself or reading," and recalls with pleasure how she would
build little towns in her room or beg her father to let her
throw a pot, or have spirited games of chess with Tan. "I find
it very fun to be thinking all the time, figuring things out.
I guess you could say I was somewhat of a nerd," she laughs.

    It wasn't until she arrived at Yale that she felt she
belonged and that her creativity and diligence were fully
appreciated. But something happened during her junior year in
Denmark to mar that feeling of assimilation. She got on a bus
in Copenhagen one day and became acutely aware that people moved
away from her. It was the first time in her life that she felt
discriminated against.

    In ways that he couldn't have fully imagined, Edward
Ashworth found the right person to design the Civil Rights
memorial.

    When she flew south to Montgomery, the "cradle of the
Confederacy," in May 1988, Lin was excited but apprehensive.
The material she had been sent from the law center included
videotapes of the PBS series Eyes on the Prize, the book that
complemented it and a short documentary on the Ku Klux Klan, one
of the groups whose activities the SPLC monitors. Before
receiving all this, Lin knew very little about the civil rights
movement. She wasn't even born when Rosa Parks was arrested for
refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955, the
arrest that led not only to a yearlong bus boycott but also to
the "official" beginning of the nonviolent movement. The first
thing she remembered, and not from the time it happened, was an
image of Governor George Wallace looming in a doorway at the
University of Alabama, unwilling to let any black student enter.
The fact that she was neither a participant in the movement nor
a well-versed student of it did not prevent her, as it did not
prevent her with Viet Nam, from having an intuitive sense of
what was needed.

    At lunch that day, all she could think about (and all
Richard Cohen, the legal director of the center, could recall
her talking about) was water. On the flight down, she was
particularly struck by a line from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I
Have a Dream" speech, the line, partly borrowed from the Bible,
that said, "We will not be satisfied until `justice rolls down
like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.'" It
occurred to her that water would be an ideal element for a hot
climate, that its calm, soothing quality and quiet, constant
sound would be perfect for the "contemplative area" she wanted
to create in front of the center, a place that would have all
the tranquillity of a Japanese garden, a place "to appreciate
how far the country has come in its quest for equality and to
consider how far it has to go."

    What she showed Morris Dees, the SPLC's executive director,
and Cohen that day, roughly sketched on a paper napkin, was a
slightly curved black granite wall, 8 3/4 ft. high and 39 ft.
long, that would bear part of the King passage. Above it, on
what would be the upper plaza, water from a small pool would
flow gently down the wall, gently enough that one could easily
read the words. To the right of the wall would be a curved set
of stairs.

    This, she said, was "the universal" element, and she would
return with "the specific" to balance it.  When she did, a few
weeks later, she brought an un usual-looking model: an
asymmetrical black granite disk that would be 11 1/2 ft. in
diameter at the top but only 20 in. across its base, an object
that from a distance would appear to be floating in air. It
would be 2 1/2 ft. high and have water flowing evenly and slowly
across its flat surface. Underneath the water, etched in the
stone and looking like points of a sun dial, would be the words
-- the names and the events -- that would tell the history of
the civil rights era. They begin with 17 MAY 1954 SUPREME COURT
OUTLAWS SCHOOL SEGREGATION IN BROWN VS. BOARD OF EDUCATION and
end with 4 APR 1968 DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ASSASSINATED
MEMPHIS, TN (there will be 53 entries in all, with a conspicuous
space before Brown and after King, suggesting the struggle
didn't begin with the Brown decision or end with King's death).
Anyone, she said -- be it someone who had lived through the
events or a child who had not -- could move around the piece,
putting his hand through the water to touch the words or simply
seeing his reflection in the water itself. And by doing so, the
person could either remember, or learn for the first time, the
history recorded there.

    "It's the kind of thing," Lin says, "that requires
patience, awareness and added sensitivity. 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. I wanted to put
the truth down, just once. Placing it, just once." After all,
she asks, "if you don't remember history accurately, how can you
learn?"

    But in asking that seemingly simple question, she raises a
complex issue that will surely not be resolved until the
memorial is dedicated, if then: How will the South in general,
and Montgomery in particular, feel about this tribute to a
painful time? And will Maya Lin find herself and her work
surrounded by controversy once more?

    "You put that memorial in front of your building, Bubba,
and someone is bound to come over and tear it up," Dees was
told earlier this year by Calvin Whitesell Sr., an attorney for
the city during the Freedom Rides of 1961. "George Wallace once
said to me," Whitesell recalls, "that the thing that always kept
the South down was that the minute the South recovered from the
Civil War, they started sending money to the North for bronze
statues. We've got a bunch of them here, and I think you'll find
that most people don't give a damn about memorials." He sees the
real reason for the memorial this way: "A wonderful fund raiser
for Morris. He came to Montgomery to do good, and he's done very
well."

    Dees has heard all this before, and contends that there are
people in Montgomery who will never forgive him for
successfully filing suit to integrate the city's YMCAs. And
while he doesn't rule out the possibility of vandalism (a 1983
fire bombing forced the SPLC's move to its present location),
he feels that anything like that would come from outside
Montgomery. He feels that way primarily because he believes
Montgomery has changed.

    "It's like a divorce," he says, sitting in his second-floor
office from which can be seen, in the distance, the state
capitol at whose steps the historic 1965 march from Selma ended
and where the Confederate flag still flies. "For a long time you
don't want to talk about it. But after a while the pain is gone;
you're able to live with it, discuss it. I think the city is
coming around to that now. Montgomery fought the movement at
every turn, but I think it can be a very positive, cathartic
thing for the city to face up to its past."

    One Montgomery resident who agrees with him is Robert
Beasley, a black, 75-year-old retired high school principal
whose only connection to the memorial is his fear -- his fear
that without it "much of what happened -- the sacrifices that
were made -- will be forgotten, unless we leave it in stone for
generations to see."

    As Ken Upchurch, 33, a native of Montgomery whose firm is
building the memorial, puts it, "If its purpose is to educate
people, it's already worked with me. It's made me aware of a
period that I might never have learned about."

    And Lin herself, he says, has helped him understand a
design that he initially viewed as a contractor's night mare.
Last April, Upchurch finally asked her what he had been meaning
to ask for quite some time. He wanted to know how she had come
up with it all, curious about the relation of the vast water
wall to the low-lying table that will be in front of it,
surrounded by a plaza of white granite.

    She spoke of aesthetic quality, of "dissimilar elements
maintaining equilibrium." She spoke of shapes echoing one
another, of objects and concepts coexisting in harmony. "Things
can look different," she said softly, "but still be the same."

    She might have said people, but didn't. Ken Upchurch
understood.

    For two weeks now, the memorial has been in place behind
the white plywood walls on Washington Avenue. But Lin won't
really know if what she envisioned truly works until someone,
someone like Calvin Whitesell Sr., can experience it for
himself.