Silver Upper White River, 2014
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK
Recycled Silver

131” x 240” x 3/8”


Photography: Dero Sanford, courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

This sculpture, in Crystal Bridges’ bridge gallery, represents the upper portion of the White River, a major waterway which runs 722 miles through Arkansas and Missouri. The four lakes represented in the sculpture, from left to right, are Beaver Lake, located about 20 miles east of the museum and which serves as the source for drinking water in much of Northwest Arkansas, as well as Table Rock Lake, Lake Taneycomo, and Bull Shoals. Lin’s choice of silver as the medium is due to the fact that when Europeans arrived originally in the Americas, there were so many fish in the streams that the reflections off their backs gave rise to the term “running silver.”

Maya Lin was commissioned to create this work especially for the museum. Although it resides in the Early Twentieth Century gallery, it is of course an early twenty-first century work; the piece is representative of one of the cases in which the location, not the time period, is key to its placement in our permanent collection, as it sits over the museum’s lower pond. Upon close observation, the viewer can see that the silver prongs of the river seem to spider out and trickle down in a huge U-shaped arc. The various jogs the river takes are reminiscent of veins or nerves of the human body, which underscores humanity’s inextricable connection to the natural world around us, an issue Lin does not want us to forget as we move forward.