Lin May Saeed knew her days were numbered as she was organizing her final show, at Berlin’s Georg Kolbe Museum, where it opens this week. That exhibition, titled “In paradise, the snow falls slowly” (in German, “Im Paradies fällt der Schnee langsam”), will soon stand as a memorial to Lin, who passed away on August 30, of brain cancer, at age 50.
As I grieve the giant loss of my friend, and of an artist whose work impacted me profoundly, I’m finding peace in the title of this exhibition, in the image Lin left of slow snow. It’s such a generous gift, a great comfort for the loved ones she is leaving behind. And the gesture is so very Lin: she was always thinking of others, and always so graceful.
By “others,” I mean other people and also other animals. The Iraqi-German sculptor dedicated her life and her art to advocating for animals: their care, their liberation. She was a vegan and a stalwart. She rescued animals, like the two bunnies who lived in her studio. They played in the non-toxic snow-like flakes that fell to the ground as she carved sculptures from blocks of polystyrene. With her sculptures, she wanted to give us a new iconography for human-animal relations.
Lin May Saeed, Girl with Cat, 2019, polystyrene foam, jute, steel, acrylic, 701 by 36 by 35 inches.
Courtesy the artist and Jacky Strenz, Frankfurt.
I cannot overstate her importance to my thinking and to my commitments. Lin was an artist who had an essential message that she believed in with unusual conviction. But she was also brilliant in the way she thought through the limits and potentials of political art. She had a special way of making her beliefs unmistakable and irrefutable without ever arguing with or preaching to her viewers. She cared deeply and sincerely about other beings, and she extended empathy both to animals and to her audience.
She did this through what she liked to call “fables.” Lin’s Styrofoam sculptures portray vignettes from history and myths—she often turned to scenes from Abrahamic scriptures—that center around human-animal relations. St. Jerome and the Lion (2016) shows the initial meeting of these two titular creatures, when Jerome removed a thorn stuck in the lion’s paw. In response, the lion remained ever grateful, opting to spend the rest of his life by the hermit-saint’s side. The two formed a tender, powerful bond. Meanwhile, Lin’s 2019 sculpture Girl with Cat shows a girl kneeling next to a feline companion, one whose slender body resembles the cats found in hieroglyphs and Egyptian statuettes. The work refers to the fact that the cat-worshipping ancient Egyptians had no term for “animal,” no word to flatly other our kin.
Fables like these lay bare how today’s status quo—ripe with factory farms and other forms of casual cruelty—is so far from “natural,” and in fact is far more debased than the examples that precede. Human-animal relations have been powerfully different across time and cultures, and they can and should be different again. Lin’s fables don’t directly confront one’s personal ethics, but still, I’ve met at least three people who became vegetarians after encounters with her work, and I imagine there are others. Her compassion was contagious.
One of my core beliefs is that art and culture can alter the way we perceive things we thought we knew. This is the first step toward other, more tangible kinds of change. As Rebecca Solnit once put it, “Revolution takes place first in the imagination.” It was Lin who first helped me see and believe that when I was fresh out of grad school and had just started writing about art professionally. I’ve carried that belief with me ever since.
Lin May Saeed, St. Jerome and the Lion, 2016, steel and lacquer, 59 by 73 1/4 by 3 7/8 inches.
I know I’m far from alone in being transformed by Lin. Upon learning of her passing, the artist collective Slavs and Tatar wrote, “Rarely has another artist’s work affected us so much.” Forrest Arakawa-Nash, who runs the website Contemporary Art Daily, wrote that Lin “forever changed my life and the way I relate not only to animals but to art.” I’m sure that the effects of all she did have only just begun to ripple.
Lin’s grace and kindness were infectious. Somehow, she was so gentle and also a total badass at the same time. One of my favorite pieces by her is The Liberation of Animals from Their Cages IXX (2016). It’s a metal gate, but instead of a grid or chain-link pattern, steel strips form the outline of a masked figure carrying a pig through the broken cage while pliers lie at their feet. It’s a triumphant image of refusal. I aspire to be the person she’s depicting.
I feel sad thinking about the works not made and the conversations not had, but I also feel deeply proud of Lin. I want to live in the worlds she showed me with her artwork, and maybe you do, too.