MAYA LIN's Monumental VISION

For an ARTIST who makes exceedingly LARGE, powerfully URGENT PUBLIC WORKS and ARCHITECTURAL CREATIONS that take on BIG subjects like LOSS, MEMORY, and the CLIMATE CRISIS, she has always been intensely PRIVATE. But to her, it's all PERSONAL.

- THESSALY LA FORCE

One morning in September, Maya Lin welcomes me into her apartment, a series of merged units with Gothic-style windows in a former women's college near Central Park on New York City's Upper East Side. At five foot three, with her signature long bob, Lin, now 64, is slight, with an affable demeanor and a surprisingly low voice. Dressed in jeans and a brown shirt, she ushers me outside to her rooftop terrace, where an array of potted plants lends a lush calm to the frenetic energy of the city below. Lin recently adopted a nine-month-old mini-Aussie puppy named Sable, who circles us before scampering inside.

Lin likes working from her bedroom, which is just down the hall. She always has-ever since she was catapulted to fame in 1981 as a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale, when the design she created in her dorm room was selected from 1,421 submissions for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. There and on airplanes, where she feels slightly out of reach from life's demands. She has her studio downtown, of course, where she employs a handful of people, and not too long ago she took over the downstairs office of her late husband, the art dealer and collector Daniel Wolf, renowned for the world-class collection of photography he assembled for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

In January of 2021, Wolf died suddenly, at the age of 65, after suffering a heart attack. The family, which includes their two daughters, India and Rachel, had all been together at their house in Ridgway, Colorado, when it happened. The couple had been married for almost 25 years. When the subject comes up, Lin's face, at first gracious and warm, stiffens briefly into a mask. "It rocked us all," she says.