After all our blizzard difficulties nearly everyone has power again, my classes are back to normal, except for the five or ten minutes of catching up with everyone's outage stories. Yesterday's documentary film class was the biographical film about Maya Linn, the architect-sculptor who won immediate national fame in 1981 (I think that date is right) with her design for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington -- hard to believe it was thirty years ago, and hard to remember the resistance and outcry that she, at the age of 20, withstood to maintain the integrity and purity of her conception which has since proved to be one of the most powerful memorials to those who died in a war.
Women's history month is next month, but this is Black History month. The showing of the film was not intentionally meant to celebrate either but it does, as she also designed the Civil Rights memorial -- very different and yet very much the same sort of quiet, elegant design that allows people to relate very directly and emotionally to an event in our history. She is, I suddenly realize, no longer this "young" woman, she is a mature artist and architect who has produced and continues to produce other powerful work. I have read much over the years but this film skillfully and tastefully brought the story into perspective.
