In an age of digital navigation apps such as Google Maps and Waze, we often take for granted our ability to see the features of the Earth from a height of miles and to map our environment with the swipe of a finger on a screen. For Silver Erie, Ohio native Maya Lin plotted the contours of Lake Erie and the Maumee River and then had them cast in reclaimed silver. By removing the lake and river from their geographical context, she turned them into a shimmering abstract shape that allows us to view nuances we are not able to see when viewing the bodies of water in reality. 

Lin has long been interested in the ways that art and the land can communicate with each other and inform our experience of both. A dedicated environmentalist, she has explored water—the essential element for life on Earth—in her art to address how humans impact the environment. These works “deal much more specifically with my personal love of landscape, the environment, how we see the land through a microscopic view, a satellite view of the Earth,” she has said. “That's my art.”

Maya Lin (American, born 1959), Silver Erie. Recycled silver, 2012. 24 3/4 × 54 × 1/2 in. (62.9 × 137.2 × 1.3 cm). Gift of Mr. & Mrs. William E. Levis, by exchange, 2012.103. On view in Gallery 4.