- 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 -
