Ghost Forest Seedlings, a generative art series by Maya Lin, is an extension of her acclaimed 2021 Ghost Forest installation in New York’s Madison Square Park, reflecting a woodland area decimated by climate change. This new series of works explores the organic growth patterns of a living, subterranean network of tree roots. Lin’s blockchain-backed algorithm for the project generated five hundred unique NFTs, featuring seedlings that grow into expansive systems over time. Each NFT is translated into a physical print on sustainably sourced bamboo paper, showing the root network in its final, fully evolved state. Forgoing the geometric patterning of most computer-derived growth patterns, Lin collaborated with digital collective E.A.T__WORKS and technical development firm NearForm to devise organic outcomes as varied as those found in naturally occurring organisms. Ghost Forest Seedlings reflects the artist’s deep sensitivity to the complexity, beauty, and fragility of the natural world and its interconnected systems. Each iteration represents both an opportunity for regeneration and new life in the face of climate change and a call to action to address the environmental crisis in our local communities.

About the artist
Maya Lin (b. 1959, Athens, Ohio) critically engages with notions of place, memory, and time to explore how we experience and relate to our surroundings. Lin attended Yale University, where she received her BA in 1981 and a Master of Architecture in 1986. Interested in both landscape and the built environment, Lin’s work encompasses memorial designs, including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. (1982); architectural works such as the Neilson Library at Smith College (2021); and large-scale environmental installations such as her Wave Field series at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1995), Flutter, Miami, Florida (2005), and the Storm King Art Center (2007–2008). 

Lin’s artwork has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide, with works in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; and the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, CA, among others. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Lin was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2009 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. Lin lives and works in New York City.