In the ‘Ghost Forest’ by Maya Lin ’81 MArch ’86, the Trees Are Talking Back

The artist and architect Maya Lin ’81 MArch ’86 began her career with a response to a war. Her 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, a blade of black granite slashed into American soil, commemorates a “foreign” war that became an internal one and divided the nation. Her installation, “Ghost Forest,” which was on view in Madison Square Park in Manhattan through …

Scholar and Educator Kymberly Pinder ’95 Ph.D. Named Yale School of Art Dean

Kymberly Pinder ’95 Ph.D., an internationally recognized scholar of race, representation, and murals, has been appointed the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the Yale School of Art, President Peter Salovey announced in June 2021. Her term began July 1. Pinder has distinguished herself throughout an academic and curatorial career that has involved a series of major leadership positions. Her scholarly work, which …

Sarah Sze ’91 Debuts “Fallen Sky” and “Fifth Season” at Storm King Center

On June 12, Sarah Sze ’91 unveiled two sculptures at Storm King Art Center: “Fallen Sky” and “Fifth Season.” “Fallen Sky” is the first major, permanent, site-specific commission for the influential 500-acre art park since Maya Lin’s 11-acre earthwork project “Wave Field” premiered in 2009. “The relationship of the human to landscape is this age-old exploration of artists,” Ms. Sze said, …

Dawoud Bey MFA ’93 on 6 Photos That Pushed His Work Forward

Dawoud Bey’s work is both a documentation and an excavation. The photographer is preoccupied with history and its effects on our contemporary experience, chronicling the America that resides largely in the shadows and bringing it closer to the center. Often depicting Black subjects, Bey understands that the collective aches we feel today are the remnants of yesterday’s agony, attesting to poet …

Maya Lin ’81, MArch ’86 and her Ghost Forest Exhibition in Madison Square Park

On Earth Day, Maya Lin stood in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park surrounded by dead trees. The artist and architect had just completed Ghost Forest, an installation of fifty lifeless cedars cleared from New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, where rising sea levels and salt-water infiltration now threaten the woodland ecosystem, slowly rotting trees from the inside. Tragic figures, the cedars remain standing as …