Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11

When Barack Obama awarded Maya Lin the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 22, 2016, he lauded her most famous work's focus on “individual lives” and losses, explaining that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has changed the way we think about monuments, but also about how we think about sacrifice, and patriotism, and ourselves. Maya has given us more than just places for remembering—she has created places for us to make new memories. Her works are “physical acts of poetry,” each reminding us that the most important element in art or architecture is human emotion (“President Obama's Remarks at the Presidential Medal of Freedom Ceremony,” Boston Globe, Nov. 23, 2016). The president might have been introducing the central arguments of the art historian Harriet F. Senie's Memorials to Shattered Myths which examines the new forms of and popular demands on commemorative processes and public memorialization inaugurated by Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM), the controversies and compromises its construction generated, and the public's unprecedented emotional response and ongoing attachments to it.