An Evening with Maya Lin
In conversation with Joseph Becherer
Presented by the Franco Institute, the Notre Dame Arts Initiative, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art
The Franco Institute, Notre Dame Arts Initiative, and Raclin Murphy Museum of Art host a free public event in the Museum’s atrium featuring artist Maya Lin.
In conversation with Joseph Becherer, Director and Curator of the Raclin Murphy Museum, Lin will discuss her artistic and architectural practices. Her extraordinary body of work includes public memorials, sculpture, earthworks, and sustainable, site-responsive structures that often engage ecological interdependence and the symbiotic relationship between humans and the built or natural environment. A brief moderated Q&A session with the audience will follow the conversation.
Maya Lin’s Silver St. Joseph Watershed, 2023 is on view in the atrium of the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.
Learn more about the Franco Institute’s annual research theme, interdependence.
Credits
Maya Lin
Maya Lin is a visionary artist who has created a remarkable and complex body of work, encompassing sculpture, architecture, and memorials, that have explored our history and culture, our relationship with the natural environment, and the passage of time. From her very first work, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. – which she designed when she was a 21-year-old undergraduate student at Yale – she has forged a unique and highly acclaimed path practicing in both architecture and art, whilst still maintaining her memory works including five memorials that have focused on some of the critical issues of our time and have been groundbreaking in their design. Architectural works such as Novartis Cambridge Campus and the Nielsen Library for Smith College as well as a performing arts lab center for Bard College, are exemplary for their design, sustainability, sensitivity to the environment, and their deeply human spaces. Her artworks have created a unique voice in large scale environmental earthworks and her studio sculptures are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the National Gallery of Art amongst others.
Seen as a whole, Lin’s body of work is a remarkable achievement. To have achieved consistent success and renown in three distinct disciplines – art, architecture, and the creation of memorials – is extremely rare; to have done so as a woman and as the child of immigrants, in fields still overwhelmingly dominated by male practitioners, is unparalleled. Lin’s achievements have been widely recognized. She was one of the youngest women to be inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame, and she has been elected to membership in both 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, among many other outlets, and Freida Lee Mock’s 1996 documentary about her, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. In 2009, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor for artistic excellence, and in 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, praising her for a celebrated career in both art and architecture, and for creating a sacred place of healing in our nation’s capital.
Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good
Founded by Notre Dame's College of Arts & Letters in 1984 as the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts and renamed in 2025, the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good helps advance research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. To accomplish this goal, the institute provides faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the College with three main types of support: internal funding, proposal development, and conference support.
Notre Dame Arts Initiative
Launched in 2024 as a priority of Notre Dame's strategic framework, the Arts Initiative brings together the people and programs of the University’s extended arts community to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and define the arts as central to campus and community life. By transcending conventional boundaries — between art forms and across disciplines — the Initiative mobilizes the transformative power of the arts to advance knowledge, invigorate learning, and foster human solidarity.
Raclin Murphy Museum of Art
Through its collections, exhibitions, and programs, the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art serves and welcomes all to engage in wonder, spiritual reflection, inquiry, and research. One of the nation’s oldest university art museums, it maintains more than 32,000 artworks including painting, sculpture, decorative arts, works on paper, and textiles.
Funding & Support
This is a signature program of the Notre Dame Arts Biennial, funded and organized by the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good, the Notre Dame Arts Initiative, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.
Image
Photo courtesy of the artist.