Congress, Amy Waldman | featured news

In 1981, Maya Lin, a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale, won the competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The starkness of her design, as well as her ethnicity as an Asian American, fueled controversy over her victory. Politicians, art critics and veterans excoriated her, and she was forced to defend her work before Congress. A little more than two decades later, when a jury convened in New York City to decide which of more than 5,000 submissions would become the winning design for the 9/11 Memorial, Lin’s presence on the panel served as a reminder of the difficulties of aligning public art, private grief and main street opinion in the wake of a national tragedy.