Celebrated Monument Designer Maya Lin to Speak at Yale Tonight

Maya Lin, designer of some of the nation’s most renowned public monuments, will be speaking at Yale tonight at 7:30 p.m., as part of the Tercentennial celebration’s William C. DeVane Lecture series.

Most closely associated with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., which she designed as an undergraduate, Lin has worked on numerous acclaimed public and private projects since then. Her work includes a memorial for the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama, a sculptural landscape work called Groundswell at Ohio State University and a 14-foot-long clock for New York’s Pennsylvania Station.

Lin, who earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Yale, is best known locally for the “Women’s Table,” a green granite flat-topped fountain commemorating women at the University, which stands in front of Sterling Memorial Library.

Lin’s lecture this evening, “The Continuity of the Art Idea,” is the second to last of a weekly series celebrating Yale’s contribution to modern architecture. The series began with a lecture by Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, and included among other visiting speakers, Pritzker award winning architect Lord Norman Foster.

The final lecture in the series, “The Promise of the Recent Past, 1978-1998,” will be delivered by Stern next Monday, December 10, at 7:30.

Lin’s lecture will take place in the auditorium of the Yale University Art Gallery, on the corner of York and Chapel streets. Use the High Street entrance.