- applause -
My name is Nicholas Bell. I'm the Curator
In Charge her at the Renwick Gallery. I want
to thank all of you for joining us
tonight for a very special event.
I know that of all the places in the world
Washington DC is the last place in which
Maya Lin needs any introduction.
I'm not going to truly introduce her, instead
I want to thank her. Two years ago I
called Maya on the phone. She did not know
who I was. I said, "Maya let me tell
you a little bit about the Renwick
Gallery and let me tell you about the
idea that I have for this building and
what we could do with it." I think
within about four minutes she was on board.
I think it was perhaps the
moment I used the word 'wonder' that she
said, "Yes, yes wonder! That's what I've
been looking for, that's what we work
with" and she also said, "By the way - advice
comes free with Maya, which is great - she
said, by the way that show you're doing
you should call it just 'wonder' nothing else."
I want to thank you not only for
naming the exhibition, but for being the
foundation for our vision for the new
Renwick Gallery. I think that it is
incredibly fitting that you not only
began your career within a square mile
of this museum, but that a point in your
career when you were starting to reflect -
through your new book 'Topologies'- that
you've come full circle back to
Washington.
After Maya's talk, she's going to do a
book signing. Her book that came out in
October has already sold out.
You cannot buy it online so I strongly
recommend that you buy here. She'll be
signing books here. You do have to go
downstairs to the shop to purchase the
book. She will also be signing copies of
'WONDER' the catalog for this exhibition,
should you wish. She has cards for
her new project called 'What is Missing?"
Please join me in welcoming Maya Lin to the Renwick Gallery.
- applause -
Thank you Nicholas. It's really nice
being here. I love being part of this show.
Just look up for a second. It's just
almost like a childlike love of
experiencing things that makes this show
so special for me to be a part.
I'm going to talk a little bit about my work.
Can you hear if you do that?  It's a
little wispy. It took about two years to
put this book together, because I split
my time between my art and my
architecture and then there's the
memorials. Sequencing and setting up
these different parts of my aesthetic
took me a lot longer to figure out.
I'll go into that a little bit, but i'm
going to start with what is kind of,
there's three chapters based on art and
then there are two chapters on
architecture and design and then they're
broken up by the five memory works, the
memorials. I'm going to start with the
large outdoor earthworks, which the
chapter of that is called 'Out of the Earth.'
This is an image of one of three
wave fields. As an artist I work in
series trying to explore differences in
scale in one idea. This started with
one image. It's a naturally occurring
water wave called a 'stokes wave' which is
completely symmetrical. I saw this
image and I knew I wanted to make
an artwork out of it.
I working plasticine it's
like an oil-based clay. So for
the University of Michigan in front of a
new aerospace engineering building in, I
think, 1993 I was researching
aerodynamics, fluid dynamics, I came
across that one image and I knew that
that's what I wanted to make out of the
work. I started studying wave
formations. At a certain point in
time you can analyze a water wave, but
it's really hard to understand how one
wave ends another one begins.
At a certain point you literally just have to
get out there with your bulldozer
operators and build the work. It's a
little different than architecture
because a maquete can almost only get you
so far. I actually think to make a
work of art at this scale it has to keep
changing as you're building it. Anyway so
the first piece, and again I work in
series, is a hundred feet by a hundred
feet. The scale is such that you can sit
in a wave and read a book. The second in
the series is called 'Flutter.' It's at a
federal courthouse in Miami. It's not
so much inspired by a wave formation, but
what happens to the sand by wave action
as it's about to hit the shore, so
extremely shallow wave formations. Almost
two feet at the most.
It's called 'Flutter.' Again, doing work
out in the public realm you get
requirements and one for the federal
courthouse was not to make the waves
very high anyway, because they were
literally afraid of snipers.
There's just certain things that you
have to deal with that you might not be
thinking of when you're working in the
public realm. The third and final of the
wave field series is at Storm King, which
is about an hour north of the city.
You'll notice in the upper right-hand
the red lines.
Storm King Art Center was built as they
were building the highway, Route 87, and
this was the abandoned gravel pit that
they were using. They didn't know
quite what to do with it, so they hid it
behind a big earthen beram. I was
able to use all that soil and create an
artwork. It's 11 acres and for the final
wave field
the idea was - what if I could make a
field of waves that went over your head?
That allowed you to disappear within a
wave. It took about a year and a half
to build. The scale is each wave trough - in this photograph you can
see there's a high part so you can look
down on the whole field. From the lower
part you explore it and you get literally
lost in a wave and the waves are about
18 feet high at their highest.
People have said, "Well, how do you make works
like this and how do they stand over
time?" I'm from Athens, Ohio. I'm from
southeastern Ohio and throughout the
southeast there are these ancient burial
mounds of the Hopewell in Adena tribes.
Farmers have lived with these
mysterious funny hills, one is in the
shape of a serpent. There's an entire
city called 'Mound City' and they've been
there for over 1,500 years. It's just
something that even though they change,
and I keep going back up and we worked
with the state EPA, because it was a
brownfield site to turn it into this
artwork. Within row seven and row six
there were streams of water.
The microcosm in the ecology within those
rows is changing over time. If you go
through the sixth or seventh wave there are
probably butterflies living because it's
a little moisture. These pieces have a
bit of a life of there own.
This is a piece I did for a client in
a private collection in New Zealand.
It literally started as a fold of paper.
It's called a fold in the field.
I tend to model things larger and larger.
The largest models were about 16 feet
and then you just have to go out there
and build it. It took a former
flooded degraded pasture land and kind
of pulled the plane up. It's called 'A
Fold in the Field' and the folds go 60
feet high. This piece I did for a
private art estate in southern Sweden.
It's called '11-minute Line' and it
literally started I was sitting in the
driveway that was gravel and I made this
little drawing. Then I timed my
walk and it turned into 'The 11-minute Line.'
The joke is - how much
personality does one line drawing have?
When the early European settlers
first came to the New World and they
came across some of these burial mounds,
they were so convinced that the tribes
in present-day North America were too
primitive
so that certainly a more sophisticated
people came from Europe built these
pieces and then went running back to
Europe. I couldn't resist in southern
Sweden taking a little bit of
southeastern Ohio to Europe, because one of
my favorite mounds that I kind of grew
up being aware of was called the 'Serpent
Mound.' I don't know if any of you
know it. It's literally a snake and the
snakes is about to eat an egg. I wanted
to transfer a little bit of my hometown,
southeastern Ohio roots, to Europe.
That's the piece.
The second in that series is a piece
for a collection in Kentucky.
The collectors had built a house that's really
an Eames inspired house. I wanted to
explore how much the character of a
line-drawing can almost be like a
fifties boomerang shape. It's
called 'The Kentucky Line.' It's about - oh,
how big as it? It's about a 1,000 feet long and it
goes up and down and it's just in a
private secluded area of their grounds.
I'm working on the last of
that series which will be a drawing that
can't make up its mind whether it's
drawing or language. It won't look
like that but I've made about a
thousand drawings so far. We're
working on where that will go right now.
As I've been doing these large outdoor
works i've also done artworks that are
as much framed by existing architecture,
but the goal is not to be so much taken
over by the architecture, but you're
trying to create an environment working
within a framework, working within like a
man-made framework. This was a piece
called 'Groundswell' for the Wexner Center
for the Arts. When Peter Eisenman
built this building out he collapsed or
combined two grids and there were these
unplanned residual spaces that were
highly prominent. This as you entered
the building was a two-story high empty
concrete mode filling up with trash,
actually. Instead I took 43 tons of
recycled car glass. I gave myself a week,
the dump trucks showed up and I had one
week in full view to make the piece.
The only thing I did to plan it was this
one drawing, because again as an artist
can I take the spontaneity, when you're
in your studio, of just making a work of art,
could I take that spontaneity
into a more public large-scale piece?
It exists on three parts. This is
what the piece looks like today with
that moat. Again it's called
'Groundswell.' It too, the broken car
glass, looks a little like water.
I blended two different colored glasses to
get that color. A piece that I did for
the Academy, the National Academy
in Rome, which was a temporary piece.
I was asked, I was a fellow there for about
six weeks and I was doing a show and
they said, "Is it possible if you could do
a site-specific work?" I loved it.
They had no money and I found out they were
about to redo the gravel in their
courtyard and so I asked if I could
borrow the gravel for the duration of my
residency. It turns out the size of
an Italian wheelbarrow was the perfect
size when you swung it out in an arc to
make the shape of the wave. It was
called  'Il Cortile Mare' and we all
had a party when the residency was up to
rake the piece out.
It's sort of a temporal piece. A less
temporal piece is a piece I completed a
few years ago for the California Academy
of Sciences. This is an image,
sort of a topographic image of the San
Francisco Bay. In all my works I think
i'm very interested in revealing aspects
of the natural world that you may not be
thinking about. This one is called
'Where the Land Meets the Sea.' I ended
up having to combine the topographic
terrain above land and below land, because
even though technically they're the same
and the water is transmittable, that's
not how we see the world. I had to get
the topography above water from one
group and I had to get the topography
underwater, and then I have to knit the
two together. It became what I would
call one of my drawings in space.
Permanently installed, you can go out and
eat lunch under the San Francisco Bay.
Again, we have a very funny habit. If
we don't see it
we tend to pollute it. If we can't own it
we tend to pollute it. A lot of what I
focus on are kind of things that are
literally right under our feet, that you
might not be thinking about, that you
might not be seeing. That's made out of
marine grade stainless, because it's
right on the headlines at the
California Academy of Sciences.
This one was an art installation for the
Indianapolis Museum of Art. Again I was
looking around for a prominent waterway,
it's Indiana there wasn't one. Then
someone said, "Have you looked underground?"
The second largest river,
underground river in the U.S. is under
the entire state of Indiana. I went
spelunking took photographs and had
scientists go out and do
sonor soundings under the under the
water. I created a set of drawings that
created the terrain above and below the
water and created a wire landscape
drawing that at one point in the middle
you get the cross-section and that's
permanently installed. This piece for
the Aria Hotel in of all places Las
Vegas. They'd asked a group of artists
to install works and I only wanted to focus
on the Colorado River.
As you check-in -- there's lake Mead, I
think, or is that Lake Powell? You kind of
have to connect where your water is
coming from. That's out of recycled
silver. This piece for the U.S.
Consulate in China.
Well the U.S. Consulate said,  "Well you know
it looks like a dragon." It's the
Yangtze River so but I can't look at it
anymore without seeing a dragon.
Sometimes I focus on waterways because
they're incredibly important
ecologically and other times they're
just beautiful drawings that I want to, I
want to express. In this case pins
but I've as well done for the show that
traveled systematic landscapes. With
every iteration, the show traveled to
about seven places, I chose one river in
each place, but in San Diego there
really wasn't a river of note. Instead
I followed a crack in the concrete floor
and took dental picks out and silver
leafed the depot river and it still
there to this day. It led to
part of this big show, the last
part of the artworks, the third part is
the works that are inside a museum.
It's a studio sculpture.
I would say that all my work
emanates from my studies in my studio
smaller scale works because when you're
working at the scale of a bulldozer,
you want to go into your studio and you
want to make something yourself. Most
of my work comes from and emanates from
the smaller scaled works that I can
actually make myself. This is a little
drawing of a person.
This is like just a sketch. What if
I could bring a hill inside?
You could walk up it and touch the ceiling.
This led to
a show called 'Systemic Landscapes' which
tried to bring the large-scale
immersive quality of my outdoor works indoors.
This piece was 3,000 square feet, made
out of sustainable two-by-fours. From the
front approach it looks like a cresting
waterway from the back side it looks
like a landmass. This is sort of how it was
fabricated. It started at the Seattle, the
Henry Art Museum in Seattle. There
were three anchoring large-scale pieces:
'Two-by-Four Landscape' which was in
between water and land, 'Blue Lake Pass'
which took a mountain pass in Colorado
that I'm very familiar with and sectioned
it and pulled it apart to form a way,
it's almost like I was very inspired by
on some of John McPhee's writings about
geologic strata being pulled up and moved
vertically. That's that piece and
then the third piece, so it gave you
three very different relationships back
to landscape - one you walked on, one you
walk through, one you walked under.
For the wire landscape, I chose the
southernmost island in the Atlantic called
'Bouvet.' It was a ceiling island but it
was a singular point Island unlike
Hawaii which is like the Rocky Mountains,
a ridge formed island. It was
called 'Waterline' and the only thing
visible is the top two feet of this
sculpture would be above waterline
everything else is below the sea.
It just leads you to understand that the
tallest mountain in the world isn't
Everest it's Hawaii. Maybe if from an
artist point of view I can get us to
look at things that you might not be
thinking of in a different light we can
kind of reset our perspective on
something. This piece called 'Flow.'
Again FSC certified wood,
kind of a moving water wave. It was part of a
show called 'Bodies of Water' that was a
Storm King as I was inaugurating the way
field. This is just called 'Dewpoint.'
Just like scattered drops of water on
the floor out of just cast glass.
This again, recycled silver of the
Hudson River in the Long Island Sound.
Again we think of the positive
space, the landmass. We don't really think
of waterways. We tend to negate them so
again I did a reverse field to begin to
express that similar to what I've done
with the Chesapeake Bay here. You can
see the large void at the bottom. It's
Staten Island. Then Manhattan is a
little bit further up. I've
taken a look at aspects of the natural
world that are at times temporal. This
was an image of the floodplain of
hurricane Sandy. You can see the blue
at the bottom of the picture is New
Jersey. It was really hard hit and then
you've got the Long Island Sound. This
turned into a drawing in pins. I
apologize, you probably can't see that.
It's all about 12,000 pins of the flood
plane of hurricane Sandy.
I'm looking at disappearing bodies of
water. This is the disappearance of the
Arctic ice cap over time from 1973 til
2010, I think. I cut it
out of one piece of marble with every
successive layer being a reduction of
that year's mean low icecap.
Again exceedingly
interested in terrain.
I don't know why, but this is latitude
and longitude intersecting Manhattan, at 44 degrees parallel.
It turned into a sculpture for my
gallery space that really did a
cross-section to other sculpture.
Three circles, the inner one is the
terrain of the Arctic Circle, the middle
one is the 44th parallel that intersects
Manhattan, and the outer circle is the
equator which became a sculpture that
was part of a show with the Parrish Museum
in the Hamptons. You can kind of
see how complex the mountain ranges are
under the ocean. This is part of a
group show that was it the Nevada Museum
of Art that opened last year. This is the
watershed of Lake Tahoe in pins. These
are drawings. How does a sculptor
draw? I think I like to draw
three-dimensionally. In the
foreground is another glass drops, but
for this one I wanted to understand the
clarity of the water around Lake Tahoe.
I started charting rainfall and what is
called the secchi point. They drop a disc
down and the light reflection how far
down before you can't see it anymore.
Overtime to understand how much rainfall
has changed and how much clarity of the
water has been reduced and diminished.
That became a piece that spirals out
from when they first started recording
the water clarity in 1958 til 2014.
That's sort of the piece. You know
this one, this is how 'Folding the
Chesapeake' started, which I think when I
sent this to Nicholas he was like,
"that's interest
what is it?" Then I said, "Wait, wait I
am obsessed with the Chesapeake Bay,
because along with the Columbia River
estuary these are our most famously
abundant biological waterways."
I also love it because formally speaking I cast
it first a long time ago. It looks like a
ginger root to me. I also choose
waterways just because I think they're
beautiful beautiful shapes. Anyway that's
how that translated. You all know
what it looks like so we'll skip that,
but the idea was, and again with the
studio sculptures you want to place
these works within a contained white box
or not. What I loved with working
within the Renwick in its historic
nature, I still wanted the work to almost
ignore the architecture. We don't
want, I don't want to genuflect to the
architecture. It is like water, I just wanted
it to flow wherever it could. That's
sort of the genesis of that piece.
Now i'm going to switch gears and equal
to what I've been working on in the
memorials and the art I've been making
architecture. For instance these
are earlier works from my first show
'Topologies.' This is a work that I did
for American Express, their financial
headquarters in Minnesota,
it's called 'A Character of a Hill Under Glass.'
It is about bringing a hill inside,
but the bad thing that I did was, and
this is it. It's a box, a winter garden box
but it wasn't what I was asked to
install in. That's sort of what it
looks like so it's called 'A Character of
a Hill Under Glass'.
This is the architectural form that I
was asked to put an artwork in.
If you'll notice there were these massive
2-foot diameter round columns in the
corners of the box. They had asked me
if I would install an artwork.
I politely went to the architects and I
said, "well could we consider painting the
columns maybe a charcoal grey or
something?" They said,  "no." I didn't
quite know what to do, but I knew that
there was no way and the grid of the
glass was square so it's going to be
extremely hard to relate to. So instead,
and this is the bad part of me, I'm
trained as an architect. The building is
under construction two levels below here.
You'll know that the train had way
left the station. At that point I
called in my own engineers and I called
in my own curtain wall engineers and I
redesigned it. I told the client that
I could do this, it would fit into the
schedule, we could restructure it, pull
and free the corners up, because you
kinda had to. Then I installed the
artwork. I don't have any pictures of
it as architecture but I kind of
redesigned it. My other hat is that I
make architecture. I don't do much
because again to defend and protect my
artwork I have a studio. I don't have an
office. I tend to take on one project at
a time in architecture. I'm as committed
to the architecture, but i'm also fully
aware that I have to balance between the art
and the architecture. This is a chapel for the
Children's Defense Fund in Quinton,
Tennessee,
at the former estate of Alex Haley.
Everything on the grounds is a one-story
log cabin that Alex Haley had moved on
to the site. How could I, as a
modernist, create a work that would be
contextual but yet modern, new?
The model of the Children's Defense Fund is
'Dear Load, be good to me,
my boat is so small and the sea is so large.'
I thought of a boat as being a
form that could be both modern and in
keeping with the kind of rustic nature
of the site. Then twice a year they
needed a much larger space. So the
interstitial canopied space has roller
furlings that pull down and tent the middle
structure. It got them what they need while
keeping the building pretty small for
the rest of the year. The whole thing
opens up so that you can look inside.
It increases the capacity
of the space by double. Along with it, I
didn't realize I could dialogue between
old and new which is something I do a
lot in the memorials. There was a
beautiful old barn on the property.
I actually started with the commission for
the library. There were two buildings
for the Children's Defense Fund. This is
what started it, I think, in '99. They
were about to tear this down and instead
I said, "let's save it." I slipped a
modernist skin inside, and as you go up,
oops,
I'm missing a slide or two. The reading
rooms is upstairs.
Meanwhile this is a private house in
Colorado that I think is out of order.
That's the interior of the library. Sorry
about that. This is a private
house that kind of opens and shuts in
Colorado. In time though the back box
will completely disappear in the aspen
grove only leaving the front box which
is about 4,000 square feet. They
dedicated this property to become a
conservation easement. If I go out
into the woods
I won't touch it unless it's part of
something that's what I would consider
ecologically responsible. This site
was about to be developed. The client
purchased it and then put most of the
land into a conservation easement. Just hop
on, this is sort of the inside.
A private apartment that goes from being a
two-bedroom two-bath to a three-bedroom
three-bath. I love the flexibility of
space that never looks machine that way,
but can allow us to adapt and use spaces
in multiple ways. I'm going
to end the architecture with one little
project. This is a project that I'm
working on right now in Tribeca which is
again an urban infill project.
I love participating in.
This is a site right now and that weird
little garage just is not closing the
corner, so we're in the process of
designing that.
Meanwhile since 2009 I've been working
on and I just completed a project which
you'll see three images of the inside
and that's all I'm allowed to show you.
It was the last undeveloped empty
parking lot between MIT heading towards
Central Square on Mass Ave. It's for
Novartis, a medical research lab. They
had, on the bottom, a west campus with a
very urban interior court.
I master planned the courtyard on the east
campus and convinced them to create a
public garden in the center. Then
'building a' I took the lead on trying to
maintain the four-story scale of the
adjacent buildings along the street and
letting the research tower be set back
and go up eight stories. That's sort
of how it's looking. You can still see
like construction posts out that
literally is opening as we speak. The
garden just was set in so that should
grow over time. The privacy
screen, which is the local stone quarried
within 15 minutes of Boston, it is called
'Chelmsford.' That is a south facing
wall. We did a lot of studies
about light and the glass filtering that
allows the light to go deep into the lab.
Just to give you a hint, the inside
of the lower portion which I call the
boomerang has an inner courtyard heart.
The goal of the lower level is to
support the research but to get the
scientists to come out of their silos
and work within one another. It's all
about kind of creating a much more
communal building that promotes dialogue.
I'll just give you an idea of sort
of the interior of the space, the
the cafeteria, the dining hall. From
the street everything,
by the dictates of Cambridge, had to be
given back to retail. That canopy
becomes the entrance to the compound and
also above it is the auditorium. One
last thing, the whole design was inspired
by this image. It's a macroscopic
view of bone. I figured what
medicine does is it takes from nature
and systematize it, or tries to
understand it. From the stone wall,
which is much more trying to be
reminiscent of a organic compound then
the fritting pattern within the tower,
allowed for reduced sunlight but
allowing daylight to filter through the
entire labs, but also the pattern was
almost as systematizing of nature that
way. This leads to another project that I
completed in China for a University,
where the client had built this
university in a southern part of China,
Chantal University, because that's where
he'd come from.
He'd come with nothing, he had been quite
successful so he built up this
university. They wanted a gateway and
a bell tower. They wanted the gateway
to be welcoming while still being you
know a secure entry. The stone that
you can see right through. Then the
bell tower, which is about 90 feet high,
again it's architecture but the
drawing is there and it's calligraphy.
It's a simple brush stroke.
That's how it looks and it did
withstand a category four typhoon when it
was first up, which is kinda great.
There was a part of my work that I
didn't know what to do with in the book,
or in my work.  I've worked on gardens
and I didn't know where they fit.
It took, that's what took two years
in 'Topologies' to figure out. They are a part of
design. The same way my art has an
indoor and outdoor component my
architecture does as well. This is a
little sketch of a garden in
St. Louis surrounded by a medical
research facility at St. Louis
University were some of the toughest
diseases are being treated.
The person who brought me in, his wife was
terminally ill and so I created a bowl
of flowers that you could walk out on.
That person that's real, that's not a
rendering. That's a person, but the
pattern of the lights in the what I called
the concrete lily pad is December
25, 1959.  The
night sky over St. Louis. It's the birth
year of the woman and I gave that secret
to the family. I left it up to them
if they wanted to reveal it or not which
they chose to go public with it.
As you walk out on this lily pad and you're
floating out in a water lily pool one
poem by Emily Dickinson, 'Hope is the
thing with Feathers.' I think people
are coming here with incredibly tough
medical conditions, a lot of them terminal.
I just wanted to create a refuge for
them. The bowl of lilies kind of has
this disappearing edge
it floats down to the bottom.
Here's another one. I couldn't believe this.
These are all fixer-uppers, I call them.
This was for UC Irvine. Believe
it or not, this was the School of the
Art's plaza. There was no there, there.
This is what it looks like today.
It became a garden of perception with an
outdoor theater and a drawing-room.
Sometimes I use language, and for the
School of the Arts I didn't know what
language to use. I just came up with
a simple drawing. Out of this
water table bubbles the water.
A garden for Cleveland Public Library
called 'Reading of a Garden' in Cleveland,
Ohio. The title of the piece is spelled
backwards - 'Reading a Garden' - but then look
at the reflection. The title
begins to play off the
directionality and the weight of language.
I collaborate with my brother, who's
a language poet, to create - it's actually
a three-part series. One is done for
Athens, Ohio called 'Input About Childhood
Memories.' 'Reading a Garden' was almost a
nonsense verse about reading. It's like a
children's garden. You can sit out
and follow your way through this sort of
whimsical poem. Then of course the
chapters that break up the book are the
memorials. I start, the prologue is the
Vietnam Memorial, which starts it all.
Then the women's table at Yale. The Civil Rights
Memorial. Then i'm working on two last
memorials simultaneously. The Confluence
Project, which is a six-part project
along the Columbia River. Which is
basically a 15,000 anchor ecological restoration,
where I've been met at six different
state parks, city parks, national forest
with parking lots, restroom facilities,
and manicured lawns that have no right
being there. Then we've turned them
into natural, native grasses. At Cape
Disappointment, where Lewis and Clark meets
the Pacific, they were about to double their
parking lot. We got them to do a
transit study. Turns out they didn't need
it, and we were able to reduce their
parking needs. This is what you
look at today and you can actually see
the Pacific. Again it's timed with,
it was time with the 200th
anniversary of Lewis and Clark. I was
brought in, not by just the state of
Washington through the Confluence
Foundation, but the tribal elders of the
Umatilla, the Nez Perce, the Chinook had
asked me to get involved. I was about to
start on a project focused on the
environment, and when these tribal elders
came to me I said, "I'd love to work with
you." Their request was at the
Bicentennial of Lewis and Clark, excuse me,
Lewis and Clark did not discover these
lands, we were here.  They asked me if
I would be involved. Literally
at the end goal of Lewis and Clark, their
goal was to reach the Pacific, we
inscribed a trail that leads you to the
water and on it, in their writing
you'll notice as you walk through their
entire citation of their journeys how
many villages they went through. It
begins to teach you a story of Lewis and
Clark, but intertwined with the deeper
history of the Native Americans and an
ecological history, as well.
Kind of parallel to this path is a
quiet oyster shell path that the Chinook
tribe, when they bless the site exactly
200 years to the day Lewis and Clark came here.
They invoke nature we call upon nature
to teach us and show us the way. We
inscribed that poem on to this oyster
shell path that literally follows the
original shoreline, before they put in
the jetty and the whole shoreline
changed. That's what that pathway
looks like. This is what I've been
met with most of the times - parking lots,
hedge rows that are eight feet tall and
obscure, the other most abundant estuary
in the United States - the Columbia River.
This is where we convinced them
they could half the amount of parking,
and that's what it looks like today.
It's a natural grasslands, and I kind of
disappears an artist in these places.
I'm not attempting to make art per se.
I'm attempting to get you back to nature
and disappear and leave you out there
connected back to the natural, the
natural lands. I couldn't resist, this
is what we were met with this incredibly
weird rusting fish cutting sink and this
is what it looks like today. What I
didn't know when I fell in love with
this rusty sink, and the Confluence
Foundation was really worried why did I
take a million pictures of this, was that
the creation myth of the Chinook, whose
homeland you're in is of cutting the
fish the wrong way. From the blood of
the fish brings an eagle. He flies to a
mountain that you can see from this
promontory and he lays an egg. When
the egg hatches,
it's the first people, the Chinooks. Now
as you cut your king salmon
you get to read the creation myth of the
Chinook and you realize you're in their
homeland.
With every site we tell you a little
bit about the place, whether it's
seven-story circles at Sacagawea that
really talk about the seasonal trading
routes of the Native American tribes or
Chief Timothy which became for the Nez
Perce and outdoor amphitheater that
literally was just put and are waiting
for the grass to grow. This is one
that was chosen for ecological reasons.
It's a bird blind. The National Forest
Service was blowing the dam on the Sandy
River. This bird blind will bear witness
to the river as it resumes its natural
course. On it we inscribed the 123 or 128
species that Lewis and Clark noted, but then
we tell you what is it's ecological status.
Over forty-three percent of those
species are species of concern,
threatened or extinct. The final
project will be Celilo Falls which will
be an arched walkway that will tell you
about this place. More water flowed over
Celilo Falls then flows over Niagara
Falls. It was the sacrid fishing grounds
of the Native American tribes. It was
deliberately inundated in the last dam
to go in on the Columbia Rive, the Dalles
Dam. It'll start with a geologic
history, just brief inscriptions go
to the mythic stories of the Native
American tribes, then go to the decision
of the Army Corps to dam, to create the
Dalles Dam.  The pleas of the tribes and
locals to not do this it goes silent
about two-thirds of the way. At the
very end it will tell you what it used
to sound like, as you're out now over
flat water.
That's what it used to look like.
With that I'm going to end with the last of
my memorials. That's Celilo Falls.
It's called 'What is Missing.'
It's something that I set out to do. I have probably
been since a kid extremely concerned
about the environment. My parents would
kind of scratch their heads and say "I
have no idea why." For me, I
was growing up in the sixties. Lake Erie
caught on fire, the Clean Air Act the
Clean Water Act all came into being and
I was very very aware of how much man's
impact on the environment was having.
Also we've all seen with the Clean Air
Act the Clean Water Act the Endangered
Species Act if you protect it
nature's resilient, it comes back.
- birds chirping -
'What is Missing' started as an idea.
What if I could create a memorial that
could jump form? What if it's like a Guerrilla
artwork in like water it can flow
wherever it's invited in. It's multi-sided
multi-formed, it can exist in
temporary shows. It exists permanently.
Its first installation is at the
California Academy of Sciences on their
Eastern terrace. We've created through
the BBC, National Geographic, and Cornell
Ontology Labs over 75 one to two-minute
educational films about missing species,
places, habitats. Kids love to sit in here
and learn about them.
There's a traveling exhibit called
'The Empty Room' that has traveled
throughout the U.S. and to China. I made a
black box theater. You hide projectors in
the floor, you give people these optic
plates of plexi, and they can literally
hold the species in their hands.
Creative time and the MTV billboard
loaned me there billboard for the month
of April in 2010 and so we created a 4-5
minute video segments that ran
throughout the month. Because it's a
volunteer project for me and I set up my
own foundation, I tend to surface on
earth day with new iterations of it.
I talk about it at the end of the book.
I've been building this project
experimentally and iteratively. If you go
to the website 'whatismissing.net'
it's gonna ask you to give us a memory.
I'll go into that, but here's another way
I've taken over. This is a guerilla art
project but it's actually the Philip
Lim fashion show. This was in the
fall, but what did we get him to do? Those
are, it's called 'Seven Earth Mountain'
200 tons of toxin free organic soil.
I did this and he donated to 'What is
Missing' is all I asked. All the soil was
repurposed to community gardens around the
city of New York. I got Philip to
send out to his 300,000 followers a little
information about soil. What is
Missing? Soil. Since 1961, a
third of the world's arable land has
been lost through erosion and other
degradation, but What is Missing is also
trying to get you to think about what we
can all do. It's as much about action and
about hope.
Did you know with regenerative
agriculture, which it will then tell you
it's no-till organic, if practiced on the
planet's 3.6 billion acres could
potentially sequester up to forty
percent of current CO2 emissions,
according to Rodale Institute. Did you
know that the lawn is the largest
irrigated crop grown in America?
Here's another fun fact. More gasoline is
spilled refueling lawn equipment than was
spilled at the Exxon Valdez. That's
every year. Again, maybe as an artist
I can get you to think about things
you're not thinking of hopefully with
the sense of humor at times, but then we
link as well to not-for-profit to NGOs
to environmental groups that are out
there in the field doing the work.
With this one eye focused attention on the
Perfect Earth Project and we also
included what you can do to take the
toxins out of your lawn. As you see
that pale box surrounding the green box,
that's fifty percent of your lawn.
What if you gave 50-percent, your
perimeter, to nature?
What if you created a sustainable
landscape? Again the first thing is to
make people aware of how dire the sixth
extinction is and it's not so much just
the species, but it's the habitats that
we need to protect. As an artist
trying to get you to think about things
that are missing that you might not be
thinking of. Again, how can we
protect it if we don't realize it's
disappearing? From the scale of
species that a cod was larger than a man
in 1895, and it's dwindled, and it's
completely threatened today because we
simply overfished it. There's a
phenomena that Jared Diamond terms
'landscape amnesia' and scientists refer
to the shifting baselines. With every
successive generation we get used to
what we see, we don't realize that in
Manhattan oysters were 12 inches in
diameter and lobsters were bigger than
me at the time the Dutch first came in.
Part of What is Missing on the
website is called 'A Map of Memory.' It's
collecting these historic accounts of
abundance and it also asks you personally
to share a memory. Something you
personally witnessed diminish or
disappear. That's a mountain of buffalo skulls.
The website up now 'whatismissing.net'
has videos, timelines, historical and
personal memories, great conservation
stories, and our worst disasters. You can
see these stories geo-located or you can
click a button, the clock button, and you
can also look at these stories on a
timeline. Timelines focus on citys,
waterways, and species of note and what
you'll find, like there's one of the
Chesapeake Bay, people settled mostly -
except for Madrid - where there was water,
massive abundance. First comes sewage then
comes industrial pollution, but then in
the 50s, 60s, 70s it becomes awareness,
legislation, and things coming back.
That is sort of the arc and the
message is: if we protect it
nature will come back. These
are some of the quotes that are up on
the website. Sturgeon were so plentiful
in the Hudson River they were nicknamed
'Albany beef.' Then I'm going to skip
these because you can go online.
This is just the Chesapeake Bay. The
sturgeon were so abundant and of course
with every story the oysters were
incredibly abundant in the Chesapeake Bay
but by 1890 the oyster supplies is
dwindling. The sturgeon have disappeared.
Then you begin to see in '88
how Chesapeake becomes a eutrophic
estuary but then with the 2000 Chesapeake, 2000
accord things begin to rebound.
It's going to take time but again
without protection we cannot possibly
restore these lands.
These are some of the personal memories
that have come in, ice forming on
Narragansett Bay, or fireflies in South
Korea. We're also linking to secondary
schools, and WGBH and I are working to
get high school kids to begin to
research their town, interview their
parents and grandparents. As well as
we've linked to almost 40 environmental
groups to share what they're doing.
What i'm working on for the next two
years is called 'Green Print.' It's going
to examine how we live, where we
live, what we spend our money on. Just
to give you an idea
I'm just, as an artist, if I can
contribute in any way to help get people
to rethink, reevaluate. In Green Print
it's going to tell us, there's a whole
section on individual actions that will morph
into something called 'The Save the
Planet Diet.' Lose 10 tons, 10 pounds, add
ten years to your life, and save the
planet, too. What if? - Which is much more macro
reviews of rethinking what the earth
could look like. Then something much
more analytic which will be getting into
called 'Mapping the Future.' This is
from the 'what if' section.
What if seven billion of us, actually
we're now 7.2 billion, but what if we lived at
the density of Manhattan? How much space would
7 billion people take up? State of
Colorado.
Again it's a mindset change.  Is this
really about population or is this about
resource consumption and land use?
Could we envision rearranging those
lights? Could we really talk? It's not
about moving us, we're already moving
there. Fifty percent of us live in our
major cities, by 2050
75-percent of us will and I think
70-percent of all energy is spent
in our cities or 70-percent of
our cities are producing global CO2
emissions. This is what missing is
playing with a little bit. If, and
we're always quoting, and the quotes right
out.
Curbing climate change would cost
annually 700 billion, annually.
It sounds like a lot of money and I
couldn't resist,
here are some of the things we spend our
money on. We could save the
planet, or it's what we spend on
weight loss every year and bottled water
or narcotics and meetings in the U.S. or
cigarettes. The argument is we're
spending the money and we're spending it,
here's the better one -
you go into can we rethink our
priorities? The amount of money it would
take to protect all biological diversity
compared to what we spend on the pet
industry, or you know stabilizing all
water tables vs bottled water sales in
the U.S. Again the estimates
to restore is coming from Lester
Brown's plan B 3.0. Again it's
just about kind of changing our mindset
as to what we're doing.
What we're basically doing is we're
having the biggest party in the world,
and what are we leaving our kids and our
grandkids? We do have a whole section
on what you can do, I always like. I
know it's going long, so i'm going to
hop through them. If you go to the
website under 'What You Can Do' and by
earth day they'll be going out in cute
little packets. What I'm doing is I'm
looking at how
we're consuming the planet.
Again you have to kind of look at
different areas. Again we're having a
happy little party and everyone wants to
be like us. I think we have to really
look at our consumption patterns.
Of course meat is an easy one. The
amount of acreage it takes, but I had no
idea that a rabbit is so much more
efficient than any of these other meat
sources. You kind of have to do
the math here. We couldn't resist doing
this. Then of course you can always
go lower down the food chain.
Which you know yes, most the world
eats bugs. I don't quite care for it, but
did you know that 30 million tons of the
global annual fish catch is ground up
into fish meal? What do you think a
free-range chicken or a freshwater trout
would normally be eating? Yet we're
feeding I think 1 scientists said, "we're
feeding our chicken fish and our
fish chicken, rather than maybe some
things that they would naturally be
eating. I have a few favors to ask you.
Donate Atlantic bluefin tuna.
It's the lion of the sea, and it is
going extinct. After Japan and Spain,
America is the top consumer of Atlantic
bluefin tuna. Sorry, I'm lecturing. I'm
being didactic. For that matter shrimp
is the most commonly consumed seafood.
One, it's full of antibiotics, and two
it is causing massive destruction to
global mangroves. Love this one, coffee
25 cents a cup difference we can all do it.
Second most traded good economically
after petroleum. The difference in
biodiversity between a traditional
coffee plantation and shade grown one
is three times the species can
grow in the shade grown plantation.
I love this one,
sugar is the largest crop in the world.
It has probably caused a greater loss of
biodiversity on the planet than any
other single crop. I'm going to hop in,
I mean, we could go on and on and I don't
want to. I'm going to leave you with one
thing because my goal was to connect our
habitat footprint with climate change.
Let's imagine we ate twenty percent
less meat and we gave that back to parks.
How much would that be?
That would be equivalent to all the
protected land in North America and half of
the protected land in South America.
It's huge.
As Rodale is really focused on right
now, changing our agricultural practices
to be no till, it reduces erosion,
increases water, encourages plant growth,
and really absorbs carbon. The one I
love the most,
as sea levels rise we need buffer zones,
and the beauty is wetlands sequester
three times as much carbon as a tropical
forest. As these are under threat we
could both protect ourselves and
increase our carbon absorption. I'm
going to leave you with one little film.
- background music playing -
I'm just gonna leave with one favor.
The music for that was donated
by Brian Eno and it was co-produced by
my studio and Radical Media.
Go to the website, take a card, and share
a memory. Something you've personally
witness diminish or disappear or recover.
If you can remember something your
parents or your grandparents told you
we're just trying to connect on a human
level as well as on a kind of a
scientific level with all that's going
on. That's it. Thank you.
- applause -
