Maya Lin's Newest Work Is a 'Last Memorial' to the Vanishing Natural World

It may be hard to believe now, but the long, low black wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall was radical when it was selected in 1981as the result of an open competition. The design was the antithesis of the upward-thrusting monuments to war dead that had prevailed for centuries. The fact that it was designed by a 21-year-old woman of Asian ancestry, Yale undergraduate Maya Lin, attracted even more controversy.

Her design was referred to as "a black trench that scars the Mall" and "a degrading ditch." The New Republic said the way the memorial listed the names of the dead "makes them individual deaths, not deaths in a cause; they might as well have been traffic accidents." Billionaire and presidential candidate Ross Perot was widely reported to have called her an "egg roll" during the prolonged controversy that preceded the memorial’s dedication in 1982. As part of a compromise, a more conventional statue, "The Three Soldiers" was added to the site in 1984. (You can find a full and enlightening account of the controversy at Art 21.)