Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gift to New York 

I have this vague, flickering memory of neon orange billowing impossibly through threadbare trees like the penumbric trails of large, unseasonal fireflies. I would’ve been seven years old when the late Christo and Jeanne-Claude installed “The Gates” — 7,503 16-foot gates adorned with fabric flowing along 23 miles of walkways — for 16 days in Central Park in 2005. Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates and Unrealized Projects for New York City, a pay-what-you-wish exhibition at the Shed, memorializes the temporary project — 26 years in the making — on its 20th anniversary. It consists of preparatory drawings and collages, video interviews projected on the walls, models, a real-life gate with information on the installation’s logistics, and an augmented reality version of the project that viewers can activate with iPads. It resuscitates — or, if you’re a cynic, conjures — a vision of the city, its people, and art inspired by ambitions other than amassing ever-greater wealth. 

When Central Park was constructed in the 1800s, the idea of a public park was novel. The few greenspaces in the city were locked behind the gates of private owners (see the still-private Gramercy Park). When the park’s commissioners chose an extravagant design by Richard Morris Hunt for its gates — fountain-lined stairs, a grotto honoring Neptune — architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux resigned in protest. Eventually, the commissioners reinstated the pair, acquiescing to their vision of a park for the people: “To New Yorkers,” the board stated in its 1862 annual report, “it belongs wholly.” As such, the 20 gates to Central Park — so humble you might not notice them — honor ordinary people in their inscriptions: “Merchants” (Central Park West), “Artisans” (Seventh Avenue), “Artists” (Sixth Avenue), and perhaps most movingly, “Strangers,” dedicated to those who came from elsewhere (106th Street and Central Park West). 

Christo and Jeanne-Claude — strangers, under the gates’ dedication, as the former was born in Bulgaria and the latter in Morocco — made an artwork within an artwork, inscribing the populist impulse of Central Park’s gates into their own vision. They illuminated Olmsted and Vaux’s paths in municipal orange, rendering the park’s plan visible to a visitor, thus reinscribing it as a public artwork. The gates highlight the movements of both visitors passing through them and the wind billowing their fabric, suggesting that the people, the civic, and the natural were all part of the same living, breathing, organism. They allude to Japanese torii gates, purchased by patrons in gratitude to the god of prosperity and erected at the entrance to Shinto shrines, but were paid for entirely by the artists, a gift to the public. I think of the entranceways to medieval churches, with their layers of carved stone — often called “portals” — that create the illusion of being tunnelled into a holy place. The layered portals of “The Gates” structure a secular spiritual experience. 

“The Gates” are obviously down today, though visitors to Central Park can scan the QR codes on pillars staked between East 72nd Street and Cherry Hill to access an augmented reality version of the installation via the Bloomberg app (Bloomberg, coincidentally or not, was the mayor who greenlit the project). In lieu of the real thing, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s large-scale preparatory drawings capture the heart of it, imaging the experience from a visitor’s perspective. The gates cast warm orange shadows on the paths as they bloom around the silhouettes of fellow visitors, a counterpoint in shape and shade to the blocky skyline behind. There’s a heartwrenching tenderness to them, in part due to their contrast with the coldness of digital renderings: The scumbling detail of each tree carefully cross-hatched in graphite, pairs or solitary figures making their way through the portals, the reflection of orange on nearby surfaces. 

On the day I visited, the crowd was on the older side, and the Luna Luna exhibition next door seemed to have entrapped the tourists. I felt, or imagined, the quietude of being in the company of others who had passed through these gates — not by any means an exclusive club, numbering around four million. I felt that I shared with these many strangers something so fragile and immaterial as a memory, that these neon orange gates staked not just paths in the park but in my past, our past. I felt like part of that larger organism of the city, and not “part” as in midway between being chewed up and shit out, like I often do. At the augmented reality station near the back, I pointed my iPad toward one of the icons on the model map denoting a panoramic photograph of “The Gates” in 2005, clicked, and was transported. It was like years of gunked-up life suddenly — poof — disappeared, and I dropped into a version of myself that was small and clean and stunningly conductive, like a live wire, a raw nerve. I think I almost cried. 

Still, it felt jarring to have this experience in the Shed, of all places, part of Hudson Yards, a private luxury development. Indeed, toward the back of the exhibition, almost hidden behind a vast wall, is a narrow corridor of unrealized projects. Behind them, seen through the large windows, are the Vessel and its surrounding plaza, somewhat misleadingly called “Public Square and Gardens,” as it’s what New York calls a “privately owned public space” (POPS). 

But maybe that’s just me. New Yorkers can always be counted on for their ill temper, as seen in video interviews with visitors reacting to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s project at the end of the exhibition. “It might be a positive experience,” the interviewer gently suggests to one particularly irascible visitor.

“Positive?” he responds. “That’s bullshit.”

Another interviewee would seem to agree. “Artistic?” he asks. “You have to be very modern to find this a real artistic achievement.” Then he tilts his head, as if thinking it over. “Maybe,” he concedes. 

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates and Unrealized Projects for New York City continues at the Shed (545 West 30th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through March 23. The exhibition was curated by Pascal Roulin.