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 …

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 …

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’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 …

Discussions about young artists on the rise frequently employ the passive voice. He “was chosen” for a competitive residency or solo exhibition; she “was accepted” to an elite art school. But the trajectory of newly minted art star Vaughn Spann, who opened a sold-out solo show at Almine Rech gallery in New York, is no accident. Instead, it is the …

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 …

The $8 billion renovation of New York’s LaGuardia Airport won’t be finished until 2025. But Terminal B is already complete, and it’s gorgeous. The centerpiece is a spectacular new airborne sculpture called “Shorter Than the Day,” by artist Sarah Sze ’91, a professor of visual arts at Columbia, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, and a mother of two. Sze said, …

Eric leans back in his chair, lost in thought, posing for the painter. He wears conspicuously odd socks and purple laced shoes. Objects seem to drift around him like figments in the ambient glow of the studio, or perhaps it’s the atmosphere of the painting itself, with its veils of gold and ochre. Everything is at once so distinct, from …

WTF AMERICA?” wrote the artist Genevieve Gaignard MFA ’07 on Instagram on May 27, two days after George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. With it she shared an image of her 2020 collage titled Fantasia, a piece that examines police brutality, innocence, and the white gaze. “I was obviously angry,” said Gaignard, whose work blends mixed media, sculptures, domestic installations, …