Maya Lin: What is Missing?

In this opportunity for Maine K–12 educators, world-renowned artist, designer, and environmentalist Maya Lin introduces What is Missing?, her project devoted to the planet’s biodiversity crisis as a result of habitat loss. Lin will invite Maine classrooms to collect personal memories about the natural world. Through interviews with parents and grandparents, students will share stories of Maine’s past natural abundance and present recovery. What is Missing? lives at the intersection of art, environmental science, and storytelling.

The lesson plans and assignments fulfill Maine’s Guiding Principles of helping students to become Clear & Effective Communicators, Responsible & Involved Citizens, and Integrative & Informed Thinkers.

This is open to educators of all grade levels and disciplines, as well as interested school administrators and educatorsin training.

Educators can use our Memory Guide to help students explore this theme. 

Presented by the Colby College Museum of Art and the Lunder Institute for American Art

About What is Missing?

Designed by Maya Lin as her “last memorial,” is an interactive project that combines in-depth research on ecological history with personal memories contributed by individuals, making for a truly interdisciplinary and participatory work of art. What is Missing? is a wake-up call and a call to action, showing us how to reimagine our relationship to the natural world in ways that balance our needs with those of the planet.

Read more about the artist here