The New Yorker & Me: Andrea K. Scott on Maya Lin's "A River Is a Drawing"

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Sunday, January 20, 2019

Andrea K. Scott on Maya Lin's "A River Is a Drawing"

Christina Gransow, illustration for Andrea K. Scott's "In the Museum: Maya Lin"

There’s a wonderful GOAT note in the January 14, 2019, New Yorker on Hudson River Museum’s “Maya Lin: A River Is a Drawing” exhibition. The piece, by Andrea K. Scott, is worth quoting in full:

The Mohican name for the Hudson River was Mahicannituc—waters that are never still. Lin reflects that shifting nature in a dozen elegant works made of aluminum, bamboo, bluegrass seeds, recycled silver, palladium leaf, stainless-steel pins, encaustic, walnut ink, and, most dramatically, thousands of green glass marbles. The title of the exhibition, thoughtfully curated by Miwako Tezuka, is “A River Is a Drawing.” It would seem to be a sculpture, too. The best pieces here are the site-specific installations that put three dimensions through the paces of two. A metal lattice, representing the river’s submarine canyon, is a thirty-foot-long graphic suspended in space. As the marbles shimmer along the floor, then flow up the walls and across the ceiling, they become dotted lines on a sheet of paper, a map in the midst of being folded. Lin has been an environmental activist for many years, and the restrained beauty of her art is matched by the power of her message about what climate change threatens to erase.

That “As the marbles shimmer along the floor, then flow up the walls and across the ceiling, they become dotted lines on a sheet of paper, a map in the midst of being folded” is inspired.

Scott’s note originally appeared in the December 24 & 31, 2018, New Yorker, accompanied by a beautiful Christina Gransow illustration. Gransow’s work is new to me. I look forward to seeing more of it in the magazine.