University Events

The Provost’s Lecture Series at Oregon State University
An Evening with Maya Lin: At the Intersection of Art and Architecture

Thursday, April 26, 2018
The LaSells Stewart Center
7 p.m.
Free ticket is required. Ticket sales begin January 9, 2018. 

Doors open at 6 p.m., program will be followed by a book signing.

Ticket distribution dates:

Beginning January 9, 2018, all ticket holders for the postponed April 2017 lecture will have the first opportunity to renew their tickets. An email will be sent directly to those ticket holders with an access code. Former ticket holders have this advanced opportunity to renew until 11:59 p.m. on January 29, 2018. After this deadline, the opportunity to renew tickets will no longer be honored.

Beginning January 30, 2018, tickets will be available to OSU faculty, staff, affiliates and students. OSU ID# will be required upon registration. Distribution subject to ticket availability.

Beginning February 13, 2018, tickets will be available to the general public. Distribution subject to ticket availability.

An Evening with Maya Lin: At the Intersection of Art and Architecture

Artist and designer Maya Lin interprets the natural world through history, politics, and culture, creating a body of work that balances art and architecture. Lin’s installations, studio artworks, architecture, and memorials, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, become a part of the land, merging physical and psychological environments and presenting a new way of seeing the world around us. In 2009 she was awarded the National Medal of Arts — the nation’s highest honor for artistic excellence.

Lin’s memorials address the critical social and historical issues of our time. From the Vietnam Memorial, which she designed as an undergraduate student at Yale, to The Civil Rights Memorial in Alabama and the Women’s Table at Yale, she makes our history part of the landscape.   

Lin’s art explores how we experience and relate to landscape, setting up a systematic ordering of the land that is tied to history, memory, time, and language. Her interest in landscape has led to works influenced by topographies and geographic phenomena.

Lin’s work asks the viewer to reconsider nature and the environment at a time when it is crucial to do so. A committed environmentalist, she is working on her last memorial, “What is Missing?,” a cross-platform, global memorial to the planet, located in select scientific institutions, online as a website, and in a book, calling attention to the crisis surrounding biodiversity and habitat loss.

Her architectural projects are largely undertaken at the request of non-profit institutions and include the Museum for Chinese in America (2009) in New York City, the Riggio-Lynch Interfaith Chapel (2004), and Langston Hughes Library (1999) in Tennessee. Current projects include the redesign of the Neilson Library at Smith College. Her designs create a close dialogue between the landscape and built environment, and she is committed to advocating sustainable design solutions in all her works.

Lin has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide, with works in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Smithsonian Institution.  

Maya Lin serves on the boards of the Bloomberg Foundation, Museum of Chinese in America, and the What is Missing? Foundation. She is an honorary board member of the Natural Resources Defense Council and is the recipient of the Presidential Design Award and honorary doctorates from Yale and Harvard.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has been profiled in TIME, The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. The 1996 documentary about her, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Her book about her work and creative process, Boundaries, is in its fifth printing with Simon & Schuster. Maya Lin: Topologies, a monograph spanning the past 30 years of her career, was first released in fall 2015 by Skira Rizzoli and is in its second printing.

You can be the first to know about upcoming speakers by joining the email list.

The Provost’s Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the OSU Foundation. Lin's visit is also supported by the College of Liberal Arts.

For accommodations for disabilities, please call 541-737-4717 or events@oregonstate.edu.