WHAT ART MEANS NOW TO MAYA LIN
MAYA LIN MAKES CLIMATE CHANGE ART IN MANHATTAN AND ADDS HER STAMP TO A SMITH COLLEGE LIBRARY
FOR MORE than a year, I’ve kept a folder on my desk that was stuffed full of scribbled notes for the story I was working on when the pandemic hit. Every journalist, it seems, has a version of this folder — ideas rendered moot by the arrival of our global calamity. The story, about the architecture of libraries, was also a story about how women design for women. The library in question was one I knew intimately: Neilson Library, the central library at Smith College, the women’s college in Northampton, Mass., where I studied as an undergraduate. My focus was a $120-million
renovation of that space designed by Maya Lin Studio, in collaboration with Boston-based firm Shepley Bulfinch, which had devised Neilson’s master plan.
Shepley has a deep know-how in academic design, including plenty of libraries. And Maya Lin Studio, of course, is run by the designer behind the groundbreaking Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., as well as the intimate Langston Hughes Library in Tennessee. Lin is also someone with a profound emotional connection to Smith College: Her mother, Julia Ming Hui Chang Lin, landed at Smith in 1949 after escaping the Communist invasion of Shanghai on a fishing boat‚ her Smith acceptance letter and two $10 bills sewn into her dress.
In late February 2020, as the novel coronavirus crept into the U.S., I visited Lin at her studio, a comfortably worn loft space in downtown Manhattan. She described what Smith had meant to her and her mother: “Smith saved her life,” she said. “If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t exist.”
What began as a story about a building, however, ultimately became about how so much can change in a single fateful year.
On that crisp February morning last year, Lin said something that rattled around my brain for weeks.
At the time, she was working on an art installation that would place a grove of towering Atlantic cedars — all dead — in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park. The piece, “Ghost Forest,” was intended to draw attention to a native tree that has been decimated by habitat loss, invasive species and, now, climate change.
“We cannot continue on this path,” Lin said as she described the need to work collectively to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Three weeks later, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic — and our ability to work collectively was put to rigorous test.
In the 14 months since, there has been illness, isolation and death — tolls so great they only register as abstractions: more than 578,000 dead in the U.S., more than 3.2 million globally. There also have been seismic societal shifts as the pandemic’s inequitable tolls, combined with the uprisings for Black lives, force us to reckon with systemic disenfranchisement.
Like every other institution that wasn’t Wall Street, Smith College was battered by the pandemic. A $35-million shortfall in its 2020-21 budget forced Smith to increase its endowment draw. The senior leadership team took voluntary pay cuts; more than 200 staff members were furloughed. (All but one returned.)
Though the library was being paid for out of a separate capital budget and had been financed, in part, by almost $43 million in private philanthropy, the high-profile construction project feels ill-timed. (Full disclosure: I served on Smith’s alumni association board for three years in the aughts and spent another three years on an alumni committee that helped support the libraries by raising funds for author lectures and digitization efforts. I had no role, decision-making or otherwise, in the renovation plans.)
In addition, the college found itself in the crucible of the cancelculture wars this winter after the public resignation of a librarian who alleged a “racially hostile environment” toward white people, and the resurfacing of a 2018 incident in which a Black student alleged discrimination after being questioned by a campus police officer while eating in a dorm area. (A later inquiry found that the area had been closed to Smith students and faculty for the summer and that this may have motivated the initial call.)
Smith’s situation is hardly unique. At The Times, the pandemic’s economic crunch resulted in layoffs and furloughs. And we’ve contended with reckonings over our legacy, both to the communities we serve and our own staff.
Lin, meanwhile, was grappling with the rising tide of hate directed at Asian Americans
“I was in the subway in February of last year and I sneezed and the entire subway car moved away from me,” she said in a telephone interview. “I started hearing from friends of mine who are Asian how they were being accosted . ... I had a friend who was asked to leave a restaurant. I’ve had friends in New York spat upon and called horrible names.”
“Before, it was spoken of but not publicly written about,” she said. “It’s good that it’s finally being written about.”
Moreover, earlier this year, in a cruel twist of fate, Lin’s husband of nearly 25 years, Daniel Wolf, died of a sudden heart attack. Wolf was an art dealer who specialized in photography and helped the Getty Museum amass its enviable collection of more than 25,000 images.
He died in January. Two months later, Lin was at Smith for the library’s unveiling.
“In normal circumstances it would have been wonderful,” she said. “It’s hard for me right now.”
FOR A TIME, Iwonderedif there would ever be a good time to write the story I had carried with me for more than a year. But as I combed through my notes, I realized how urgent some of its themes remained.
Early last fall, Southern California had its worst fire season. L.A.’s air grew so thick with smoke it was impossible to see the sun; the daylight that did manage to peneLin it was sallow and wan. During the worst of it, my husband and I, along with our 65-pound dog, lived, worked, slept and ate in our home office — the only air-conditioned room in the house. My pandemic weariness turned into despondence.
When I think of those days, I think of Lin’s “Ghost Forest.” In California, we are surrounded by ghost forests.
“The West will suffer in one way but the East suffers in another — with water,” Lin said. “The people who tell you climate change is a myth? Well, we’re in it.”
The installation of “Ghost Forest” was postponed due to COVID-19 but finally opens to the public on Monday. It will include a soundscape, accessible via smartphone, with calls and songs of animals once common to the island of Manhattan, plus a planting project that will place 1,000 native trees and shrubs in New York City parks.
“I didn’t just want this to be about loss,” Lin explained. “Our first public program will focus on naturebased solutions to climate change.”
The project is part of Lin’s longtime interest in ecological themes. For more than a decade, she has tracked the disappearance of plants and animals from specific landscapes through the multimedia online project “What Is Missing?”
has regularly stated that “What Is Missing?” will be her “last memorial.” She has no plans to design any memorial related to the pandemic. Still, she does consider the questions it would raise.
“For the memory works, I ask, what are the lessons we need to learn from history so that something like this doesn’t happen again?”
But at a moment in which variants are tearing through India, and the dead have yet to be fully counted, we find ourselves struggling against forces of nature that defy comprehension. In that regard, said Lin, the pandemic and climate change are kindred disasters.
“It’s a wake-up call,” she said. “We have a lot of work to do. No one can be an isolationist. You can’t save yourself from a global pandemic if you don’t learn to cooperate.”
IF “GHOST FOREST” touches on our critical climate moment, the Neilson Library project raises issues of representation that have become more pressing over the last year.
The library’s special collections include extensive original materials related to gender equality, reproductive rights and other social justice movements, and it holds personal papers connected with figures such as Gloria Steinem, Marian Anderson and Sylvia Plath.
Neilson also represents something unique: a building designed by women for a client team of women for a public that would consist principally of women. It is architecture that quite literally centers women’s knowledge at a time in which women remain underrepresented in the field. An estimated 20% of licensed architects are women, despite the fact that they represent half of all architecture degrees earned.
In addition to Lin, who leads her own small, namesake studio, Shepley Bulfinch, which served as executive architects on the project, is a majority woman-owned firm.
“I’d never been to a groundbreaking where everyone was a woman,” Smith College President Kathleen McCartney told me during a visit to campus early last year. “It was six women with shovels.”
The result is A library more adaptable to 21st century needs and more cognizant of women as scholars and subjects of scholarship.
The original Neilson, completed in 1909, was designed in a somber Renaissance Revival style by the New York-based Lord & Hewlett. But any grandeur the building had once possessed was pretty much frittered away by a pair of unsympathetic brick wings that were added in the 1960s and ’80s — the architectural equivalent of throwing a beige trench coat over an evening dress. These not only had the effect of transforming the building into a wall that split the campus in two but they turned the interior spaces into a dreary warren of corridors.
What’s more, at a time in which learning is an increasingly collaborative process that requires flexible spaces for gatherings and research, the additions contained load-bearing stacks that could neither be moved nor rearranged. The old architecture was unable to adapt.
Lin tore down the graceless expansions, preserving only the shell of the original Lord & Hewlett building. A new floor plan was intrate