Word: maya
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...America, say historians, was peopled by savages, but savages never reared these structures, savages never carved these stones." So said John Lloyd Stephens in 1839 at the sight of the lost Maya city of Copan rising eerily out of the Honduran jungle. The pioneering American archaeologist was amazed by the art objects that lay around Copan's crumbling pyramids and palaces. "Architecture, sculpture and painting, all the arts which embellish life, had flourished in this overgrown forest; beauty, ambition and glory had lived and passed away," Stephens wrote. "All was mystery, dark impenetrable mystery...
That loss is now remedied by two exhibitions. "Maya: Treasures of an Ancient Civilization," organized by the Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico, is on view at New York City's American Museum of Natural History. Next month it will move on to four other U.S. cities. A less ambitious but highly illuminating show, "Cenote of Sacrifice: Maya Treasures from the Sacred Well at Chichen Itza," drew crowds at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. It will move on to the Oakland Museum in California in the autumn and is scheduled to continue on the road in U.S. museums...
...exhibition in New York, which was coordinated by Maya Scholar Charles Gallenkamp, features objects of ineffable fragility and beauty. These include six polychrome ceramic bowls excavated over the past five years at Tikal, the largest of all the known ancient Maya cities. Found in tombs at a site dubbed Mundo Perdido in the Peten jungle of Guatemala, these funerary vessels depict the underworld gods and beasts that haunted the Mayas. One bowl rests on a turtle swimming in a painted, stylized underground sea. Rising from the lid is the symbol of resurrection, a long-beaked water bird...
...among the most familiar images in recent American sculpture -- blue-collar minimalism, a pugnacious combination of muteness with extreme manipulations of space. Nobody could call his work accessible, but there is no denying his influence on other artists. To take only one example, the black granite notch of Maya Ying Lin's monument to the Viet Nam dead in Washington, D.C., the most intensely moving war memorial in America, is basically a spin-off from Serra's land sculptures...
...Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Fund wanted something that would include the name of every American killed in Viet Nam, and would be contemplative and apolitical. They conducted an open design competition that drew 1,421 entries, all submitted anonymously. The winner, Maya Ying Lin, was a Chinese-American undergraduate at Yale: to memorialize men killed in a war in Asia, an Asian female studying at an old antiwar hotbed...