146. Celebrating The Gates in Central Park and the Power of Public Art

20 years ago, the late Christo and Jeanne-Claude transformed Central Park with The Gates, a temporary public art installation featuring 7,503 saffron-colored gates adorned with free-flowing fabric. After being elected as Mayor of New York City, Mike Bloomberg worked with the artists to bring their vision to life.

The results? Over its 16 days on display, the public art piece drew more than four million visitors to Central Park in the middle of winter and brought an estimated $254 million in economic activity to the city.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were known for their site-specific, large-scale public artworks, which often reimagined landmarks or landscapes into surreal spaces with objects, fabrics, textures, and colors. From surrounding 11 islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay with bright pink fabric, to wrapping Paris’s Pont Neuf bridge with silky, golden fabric, the pair created bold and brilliant outdoor projects that spanned the globe and garnered international acclaim for their expansiveness and originality. 

The point of their installations? It was simple; no deeper meaning was contained within the works, but they provided visitors with joy, beauty, and new perspectives on familiar spaces.  

For a limited time, the public can experience a portion of The Gates through an augmented reality experience in Central Park powered by the Bloomberg Connects app and learn more about Christo and Jeanne-Claude's NYC projects at Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates and Unrealized Projects for New York City, the latest exhibition at The Shed.

On this episode of Follow the Data, Megan Sheekey sits down with Patti Harris, CEO of Bloomberg Philanthropies, and  Vladimir Yavachev, Director of Projects at the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, to dive deeper into the 20th anniversary of The Gates, the prolific life and works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and the critical role public art plays in cities around the world.