Maya Lin designed the museum of Chinese Americans in 2009 in New York City. Lin enjoyed designing this museum because she got to reflect on the past of Chinese Americans. She designed the main exhibition to be surrounded by brick walls with some windows. Her exhibit was a traditional Chinese American courtyard where immigrants used to tell stories out the window to each other and share the struggles of daily life as an immigrant. The windows in the exhibit have videos that talked about Chinese American History. 

Maya Lin was asked to build the MLK memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1989. The monument consisted of two elements: a curved black granite wall inscribed with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a Dream” speech and a 12-ft disk inscribed with the dates of major civil-rights-era events and the names of 40 martyrs to the cause. Lin stated, “The minute I hit that quote I knew that the whole piece had to be about water,” Lin said. “I realized that I wanted to create a time line: a chronological listing of the Movement’s major events and its individual deaths, which together would show how people’s lives influenced history and how their deaths made things better.”

Maya Lin entered a nationwide competition to design a monument to honor the soldiers who had served and died in the Vietnam War. As a 21-year-old senior at Yale, she won the competition and designed the memorial in Washington, D.C. The memorial is polished, V-shaped granite wall, with each side measuring 247 feet, with the names of more than 58,000 soldiers killed or missing in action listed in order of death. This memorial caused uproar with the public when it was designed and caused Lin a draining experience.

One of her works of art was the Grand Rapids park project, which consists of an ice skating rink. When she first took the job she did not know that the city would make her include a few buildings in the park as well, so she had to act as an architect while building the bathrooms and lights. One of the neat things about the park is on the ice rink she built in lights to make it look like the stars in the sky.