Portrait of a Nation Prize Winner: Maya Lin

Maya Lin 1.5 by Karin Sander, 3D color scan of the living person, polychrome 3D inkjet print, plaster material, color, pigment ink, scale 1:5, 2014. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; acquired through the generosity of the Academy of Achievement/Wayne and Catherine Reynolds © 2014 Karin Sander, Courtesy Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Rosemarie Schawarzwälder, Vienna.
Maya Lin 1.5 by Karin Sander, 3D color scan of the living person, polychrome 3D inkjet print, plaster material, color, pigment ink, scale 1:5, 2014. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; acquired through the generosity of the Academy of Achievement/Wayne and Catherine Reynolds © 2014 Karin Sander, Courtesy Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Rosemarie Schawarzwälder, Vienna. 

This Sunday’s American Portrait Gala will honor five individuals with the Portrait of a Nation Prize, awarded for their exemplary achievements in the fields of civil rights, business, entertainment, science, and sports. For her incredible accomplishments in art and architecture, Maya Lin will be recognized.

As a student at Yale University, Maya Lin redefined the conventional notion of a heroic war monument with her understated and controversial design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Her work has continued to gain international attention, including large-scale installations such as Storm King Wavefield and what she describes as her "last memorial," an environmentalist multimedia project titled What Is Missing.

Artist Karin Sander’s diminutive 3-D scanned portrait reflects the architect’s sense of herself as a small part of a global environment. Like so many of Lin’s own designs, the unconventionality of this portrait invites the viewer to look more closely and see the sitter in a new way.

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