Gagosian

On February 12, 2005, Christo and Jeanne-Claude—accompanied by New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, among other local officials—unfurled the first panel of saffron fabric for their epic public artwork The Gates, in the city’s storied Central Park. Comprising 7,503 saffron gates, each topped with a panel of free-hanging saffron fabric, The Gates meandered through twenty-three miles of the park’s walkways. Evoking Japanese torii installed at entrances to Shinto shrines, the site-specific work encouraged visitors to linger on the paths, explore new corners of the park, and above all, remember that Central Park is an oasis of nature intended for everyone to enjoy, without strictures of class, race, or other forms of societal division. For the sixteen days that The Gates remained standing, four million people—New Yorkers and visitors from all over the world—flocked to the park to experience Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s captivating and utopian vision.

“All of our work is about freedom,” the artists explained in 2004, as preparations for The Gates were fully underway. “Nobody can buy our projects, nobody can sell tickets to experience our projects. Freedom is the enemy of possession and possession is equal to permanence. That is why our projects cannot remain and must go away forever. Our projects are ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ and ‘once upon a time.’”

Christo and Jeanne-Claude first proposed The Gates to city officials in 1980; after countless meetings, however, the project was ultimately rejected, despite Christo’s assurance that it would not cost the city a penny. Rather, it would create hundreds of jobs and bring an influx of capital from the tourists that would come to see it. As with all of the artists’ monumental projects, The Gates would be entirely paid for by the sale of Christo’s artworks—preparatory drawings and collages visualizing the temporary intervention that are exceptional works unto themselves.

It would take over twenty years until The Gates was reconsidered; in the months after 9/11, the newly elected Mayor Bloomberg and the artists returned to the project, hoping its utopian ideals and intrinsic beauty would be a powerful restoration of the city’s joy, as well as a reassurance of the park’s role as a communal place to rest and heal. As longtime New Yorkers themselves—Christo and Jeanne-Claude called Manhattan their home from 1964 until their respective deaths in 2020 and 2009—the artists likewise sought solace in the realization of this decades-long dream for their adopted city.

In anticipation of the work’s opening, in 2004 the Metropolitan Museum of Art—also located in Central Park—organized an exhibition of Christo’s artworks related to the project. After The Gates was dismantled, a similar exhibition was organized in Zurich, which also included artworks related to other projects for New York City that Christo and Jeanne-Claude had proposed over the decades but had yet to see realized; these other works served as an introduction to their long-standing interest in New York as a site for one of their monumental undertakings.

The Gates’ installation within Central Park was a feat of technical, bureaucratic, and civic planning. Each of the 7,503 gates stood sixteen feet tall and varied in width—from five and a half to eighteen feet—as the walkways narrowed and widened. Pairs of steel bases, weighing between 613 and 837 pounds each, were placed twelve feet apart to support extruded vinyl poles that were then adorned with fabric panels—almost a million square feet of nylon. Every aspect of the work was a brilliant saffron orange—an explosion of color amid the winter landscape. From the windows of surrounding buildings, the installation was a glowing golden river snaking through the park; to those walking the paths, it was a vibrant, billowing ceiling. It took six hundred workers to erect the structures, and another three hundred to take it down. Christo and Jeanne-Claude paid for every aspect themselves, from materials to installers, monitors, and security staff. And as with their other monumental works, no trace remained on-site after the project ended.

Now, twenty years after this landmark event, a section of The Gates is being reimagined along the very paths where it once stood. Thanks to an augmented-reality experience, available via the Bloomberg Connects app, visitors to Central Park can again walk through The Gates simply by raising their phones. A concurrent exhibition at The Shed traces the twenty-six-year journey to realize the project. Through a selection of Christo’s drawings, collages, and scale models—the artworks whose sale funded The Gates—as well as materials and immersive video and photography from the 2005 installation, the exhibition will reanimate the artists’ vision for Central Park. It will also showcase other unrealized proposals for New York by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, thereby expanding our understanding of their creative engagement with the city.

The artists’ plans to intervene in New York’s landscape did not stop there. In 1968, they proposed several ideas for projects within the Museum of Modern Art, which they intended to be realized at the same time. They wanted to inflate a package of air in the museum’s sculpture garden; build a wall of oil barrels down 53rd Street; erect an oil barrel mastaba in the main hall, surrounded by wrapped trees; and—the pièce de résistance—wrap the museum’s building itself. Rather than allowing these interventions to proceed, MoMA organized an exhibition of Christo’s preparatory works titled Christo Wraps the Museum: Scale Models, Photomontages, and Drawings for a Non-Event, which opened in June 1968. Executed in graphite, charcoal, and wax crayon, and incorporating a photostat of the museum, fabric, and thread, The Museum of Modern Art, Wrapped (Project for New York) (1968) exemplifies the artists’ visionary goal of transforming architecture and the urban environment.