Art/Act: Maya Lin

Every fall, the Brower Center presents the Art/Act Award & Exhibition, created to honor established artists who have dedicated a significant part of their careers to using art’s unique transformative power in the service of activism. In 2014, the Center recognizes internationally acclaimed sculptor, architectural designer, and ardent environmentalist Maya Lin, known most widely for her Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but whose most recent work has focused on threatened ecosystems. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Lin was inspired to highlight the fragility of bodies of water around the world, creating abstract wall sculptures to represent entities like the San Francisco Bay and Tuolumne River, both of which are featured at the Center.  Art/Act: Maya Lin also highlights theWhat is Missing? project, dedicated to documenting vanishing species and environments around the world through an interactive website. As part of this year’s Art/Act, the Center has partnered with Heyday Books’ Malcolm Margolin to add an in-depth exploration of the Bay Area’s environmental history as a permanent contribution to the What is Missing? project.