Maya Lin Vietnam Memorial

Maya Lin is a designer and artist that came to fame when she was 21 because she submitted her design in for the Vietnam Memorial Museum and won. She graduated from Yale University and started making sketches for the Museum. She did not expect to win because many of the best architects and artists from around the world were entering their designs in as well. Not only did she design the Vietnam Memorial Museum but she also designed the Civil Rights Museum as well. She received her Master of Architecture degree in1986. She also received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981. Not only did she receive those degrees but she has also been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Yale University, Harvard University, Williams College, and Smith College.

She didn 't want the actual memorial to be different from her design because it would take away from her hard work and effort and the memorial wouldn 't look like hers. When Maya Lin was not studying she was taking independent courses at the University of Ohio and spent most of her free time casting bronzes in the school foundry. The memorial was a black cut stone masonry wall that had the names of all 57,661 fallen soldiers carved into it. The wall was in the shape of a V and it was strategically placed so that one side of it pointed to the Lincoln memorial and the other side pointed to the Washington Monument. People voiced their negative opinions about Maya Lin specifically because of the fact that she was of Asian ethnicity. People also spoke out against her design because of her lack of professional experience and the fact that she was a female. Maya Lin won several awards after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. She won the Rome Prize in 1999, the Finn Juhl Prize in 2003, National Medal of Arts Prize in 2009, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 2014 including a 300,000 dollar art prize. She now owns Maya Lin Studio in New York City. She said that if the decision wasn 't a blind choice and they picked designs based on names and not number then there was no way she would have won due to her