MAYA LIN Sculpture recalls OU link

Maya Lin was 21 when she designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
ATHENS, Ohio (AP) -- The latest project for the artist known for creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington takes her back to this southeast Ohio college town where she grew up.
The earthwork installation "Input," designed by Maya Lin and her poet brother, Tan Lin, serves as the centerpiece of the new $780,000 Bicentennial Park on the Ohio University campus. The 3.5-acre park will be dedicated today as part of the university's 200th birthday celebration.
"Athens is so beautiful; it's a great town," Lin said from her New York studio. "I hope anyone who's ever spent time there will connect to this work."
Lin lived in Athens for 18 years. Her father, Henry Lin, was dean of the school's College of Fine Art. Her mother, Julia Lin, was an English professor.
The sculpture and its title stem from her first experience with the university when she studied computer programming and languages as a high school student.
"I couldn't type," she said. "Imagine having to enter all those numbers and not being able to type. ... My official first connection to OU was through a punch card."
So her idea was to create "a large-scale punch card in the earth."
Her OU project
The $290,000 installation -- paid for by the Ohio Arts Council through the Percent for Arts program -- sits on what had been a practice football field. It has 21 elevated or depressed rectangles separated by thin, foot-high concrete walls.
"I envision students coming up and sitting on them," Lin aid.
Cast into the retaining walls are her brother's words, including this sampling:
"Beauty like memory cannot be sequenced. Thus duration is a map composed of infrequency and the serene: things loved without pomp, a thing delayed, like watching a map."
"When I take people in to see the piece, they meander through it, start reading, and I inevitably have to tell them, 'Hey, it's time go,"' said Pam Callahan, the university's director of capital planning. "They get so involved with it."
Callahan and Lin met the summer after Lin submitted her design for the Vietnam memorial. Both worked for an architecture company in Athens.
"Input" is the first major piece at OU for Lin, 21 when she designed the Vietnam memorial. She also designed the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala., and the glass sculpture "Groundswell" for the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus.
She and her brother have created one other piece in Ohio, an outdoor sculpture garden at the Cleveland Public Library.
"My works tend to be scattered all over the country," she said. "This is so special for me. It's like coming home."