FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Media contact: Margi Caplan, mcaplan@smith.edu FREE & OPEN TO ALL—Hosted by Smith College Museum of Art, MAYA LIN, Noted American Architectural Designer and Artist, Will Deliver 11th Annual Miller Lecture in Art and Art History March 11 at 7:30 p.m., Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, Smith College Northampton, MA February 18, 2014—Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA) will host a free public talk by Maya Lin, noted American architectural designer and artist, on Tuesday, March 11, at 7:30 p.m. Lin’s lecture, the 11th Annual Miller Lecture in Art and Art History, will be held in Weinstein Auditorium, Wright Hall, at Smith College. No reservations are required; doors will open at 7 p.m. and early arrival is encouraged (overflow seating with simulcast available if needed). Photo: Walter Smith This year’s Miller Lecture coincides with a major photography show at SCMA by the writer, scholar, and landscape architect, Anne Whiston Spirn. According to Jessica Nicoll, Director and Louise Ines Doyle ’34 Chief Curator of SCMA, The Miller Lecture Committee's invitation to Maya Lin recognizes her extraordinary achievement in the world of art and design. Her return to Smith is particularly timely, as her ongoing investigation of landscape as a context for her work resonates with the Smith College Museum of Art's current focus in its special exhibition, The Eye is a Door: Landscape Photographs by Anne Whiston Spirn. SCMA’s Miller Lecture series was established in memory of Dulcy Blume Miller, Smith College class of 1946. The Dulcy Blume Miller, class of ’46, Lecture Fund enables the Museum to bring a leading artist, architect, or art historian to campus each year to give a major public lecture. This program is sponsored in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Media sponsorship has been provided in part by the Valley Advocate, New England Public Radio, and WAMC Public Radio.     
As a teaching museum affiliated with Smith College, SCMA is a non-­‐profit institution dedicated to educating and engaging its academic and broader communities through meaningful and memorable encounters with exceptional art. In SCMA’s galleries, classrooms, and Cunningham Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, visitors experience a world-­‐class collection that includes modern and contemporary art, American and western European masterworks, antiquities, emerging collection s of Asian and African art, and a comprehensive collection of works on paper. SCMA and the Museum Shop are open to the public year-­‐round Tuesday–Saturday, 10 to 4, Sunday, noon to 4, and on Second Fridays until 8 p.m. An accredited member of the American Alliance of Museums and a founding member of Museums10, a regional cultural collaboration, SCMA is also a member of the College Art Association and the New England Museum Association.     
MAYA LIN, Noted American Architectural Designer and Artist, Will Deliver 11th Annual Miller Lecture in Art and Art History Hosted by Smith College Museum of Art…. Page 2. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Maya Lin has maintained a careful balance between art and architecture throughout her career, creating a remarkable body of work that includes large-­‐scale site-­‐specific installations, intimate studio artworks, architectural works and memorials. From recent environmental works such as Storm King Wavefield, Where the Land Meets the Sea and Eleven Minute Line to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where she cut open the land and polished its edges to create a history embedded in the earth, Ms. Lin has consistently explored how we experience the landscape. Her studio artwork has been shown in solo and group museum exhibitions throughout the U.S.A. and abroad. Ms. Lin's current exhibition, Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes, originated at Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and is the first to translate the scale and immersive capacity of her outdoor installations to the interior space of a museum. Ms. Lin is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York City. Her architectural works have included institutional and private commissions, from a chapel and library for the Children's Defense Fund to the Sculpture Center's space in Long Island City to Aveda's headquarters in downtown Manhattan to private residences throughout the Country. Ms. Lin completed the design for the Museum of Chinese in America's new space in Manhattan's Chinatown, which opened in the spring of 2009. Maya Lin received her Master of Architecture from Yale University in 1986, and has maintained a professional studio in New York City since then. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Presidential Design Award, a National Endowment for the Arts artist' award, the William A. Bernoudy Resident in Architecture fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, the Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an AIA Honor Award, the Finn Juhl Prize, and honorary doctorates from Yale, Harvard, Williams, and Smith College among others. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2005 was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Ms. Lin is currently working on what is her final memorial, What is Missing? http://www.whatismissing.net/#/home, a multi-­‐sited work existing in select scientific institutions, online as a website, and as a book, which focuses on bringing awareness to the current crisis surrounding biodiversity and habitat loss. Excerpted from mayalin.com # 30 #