Monuments and Waves by Maya Lin@Arch

Maya Lin’s permanent installation at the Storm King Art Center is called “Storm King Wavefield.” It was commissioned by the center, and covers 11 acres.

Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times

"Its seven parallel rows of rolling, swelling peaks were inspired by the forms of midocean waves but echo the mountains and hills around them," Holland Cotter writes.

Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times

Ms. Lin is known mostly as a creator of urban commemorative sculptures, the first and most famous being her Vietnam Veterans Memorial for the Mall in Washington.

Photo: Bill Crandall for The New York Times

The Civil Rights Memorial for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., was created using black stone, that is incised with a historical timeline and rinsed by fountain water.

Photo: Gary Tramontina for The New York Times

Ms. Lin’s subsequent career has taken her out of the memorial business and in the more directly earth-sculpturing direction. “Wave Field,” installed at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1995, is a 10,000-square-foot grouping of earthen mounds, the highest six feet, their shapes based on those of scientifically measured ocean waves.

Photo: © Maya Lin, Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York; Photo by Jerry Thompson

The “Storm King Wavefield” is the third and last of her “wave” series and by far the largest at 240,000 square feet, with heights of 15 feet.

Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times

“Storm King Wavefield” is neither fatalistic nor utopian, commemorative nor history-free, natural nor artificial, unstable nor fixed, it is a puzzle to ponder but also — first things last — a soul-soothing place of retreat, Holland Cotter writes.

Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times

@Source from: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/05/08/arts/20090508_MAYALIN_SLIDESHOW_index.html