Visual Arts

SAN DIEGO – Artist Maya Lin has always had a deep feeling for the land. As a child, she roamed the leafy woods in southern Ohio, listening to songbirds that filled the forest.

Now, Ms. Lin perceives a growing stillness, as the number of songbirds across America are killed off by habitat destruction.

The growing degradation of the natural world haunts Ms. Lin – celebrated as the creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the reinventor of the American memorial genre – as she pulls together plans for what she calls her "last memorial."

The title of this work-in-progress is evolving: perhaps "What Is Missing," perhaps simply "Missing." But the theme is clear: Ms. Lin's finale will grieve for the animals, birds and plants driven into extinction, and warn of the urgency of acting now to halt the devastation.

Ms. Lin envisions it as a multisite chronicle, including photography and video, at places around the world and with a commemorative list of names – this time, the names of extinct species. It will be launched on Earth Day, April 2009 by the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, which chose her design for its new building in Golden Gate Park.

"Do the math, guys. Where do we want to be in 50 years? That's the question," she said at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego as she installed her latest exhibit.

"We're in the sixth-largest extinction in the Earth's history, and it's the only one caused by a single species," Ms. Lin said. "The top 10 songbirds we grew up with are in a 40 percent-to-70 percent decline. Our oceans are being devastated by overfishing. The landscape we grew up with has been significantly diminished. I just want to bring attention to it and give people the idea that you can do something about it."

Ms. Lin's artistic fame began when her stark design for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall was chosen while she was 21 and a student at Yale. Now 48, she has become so associated with monuments that when terrorists attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, faxes cascaded into her Soho studio asking her to prepare a memorial sketch.

" 'What Is Missing,' " Ms. Lin said, "will close the [monument] series for me. It's so near and dear to my heart. This is the only one I've instigated ... I want the last one to be so personal, something I care so deeply about."

Los Angeles Times