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."