National Prize for Maya Lin Project

The GreenWorks' Confluence Project recently received national recognition, winning the 2009 "Excellence on the Waterfront" Awards Program.  See the full article below as posted in the Chinook Observer. National prize for Maya Lin project Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Photo courtesy GreenWorks The fish cleaning table at Cape Disappointment State Park is one of the completed Confluence Project sites.

CAPE D - The Confluence Project, which includes the outdoor artwork by Maya Lin in Ilwaco, has earned additional national recognition.

The project was honored with the top award in the Waterfront Center's 2009 "Excellence on the Waterfront" Awards Program. The competition was founded by the Washington, D.C.-based organization in 1987 to recognize the best examples of waterfront work by communities, developers and design firms around the world.

The Confluence Project was formed in 2002 to create seven works of art on sites of cultural and historical significance. Each of the sites features an art installation by Lin that interprets the area's ecology and history, encouraging the visitor to reflect on how the surroundings have changed over time.

Conceived to mark the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the sites reference passages from the Lewis and Clark journals. Each of the Confluence Project's sites is linked to water,

Three of the Confluence Project's seven sites are complete. Lin collaborated with GreenWorks, a Portland-based landscape architecture firm, on the Cape Disappointment State Park and Sandy River Delta sites; Jones and Jones, a Seattle-based landscape architecture firm, collaborated with Lin on the Vancouver Land Bridge.

Cape Disappointment in Ilwaco has four artistic elements. One is a large block of basalt used as a fish-cleaning table, on which Lin engraved the traditional Chinook story of creation. A trail leads to an amphitheater. An oystershell bed surrounds upended drift logs at the forest edge, providing a place for reflection. A piece of land buried under a parking lot for decades now flourishes with native plants and a water overlook.

The other planned sites are Celilo Park near the Dalles, Ore.; Sacajawea State Park in Pasco at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers; Chief Timothy Park at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers in Clarkston and Ridgefield, where the Columbia and Willamette Rivers are joined.

In selecting the Confluence Project for the 2009 Excellence on the Waterfront Honor Award, the jury noted the rich joining of art, landscape architecture and design, the public outreach entailed and the amount of fundraising required. There was also appreciation that public agencies involved did not, as one juror put it, "cut out the magic and poetry from the project."

The nonprofit Confluence Project is based in Vancouver, and is led by Executive Director Jane Jacobsen. For information, log onto (www.confluenceproject.org)

For more information about the article and the Chinook Observer visit:  http://www.chinookobserver.com/Main.asp?SectionID=1&ArticleID=31896