Dear Thirsty,

Next Saturday Central Park will sport a new and completely delightful yet temporary makeover. Artists Jeanne-Claude and Christo, famous for their international outdoor art projects, will unveil a 23-mile series of 'gates', 16 feet high, hung with bright curtains of orange fabric. The curtains will hang seven feet from the ground.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are a wife-husband team who have been wrapping, cocooning and otherwise festooning large public and natural structures since 1968, when they wrapped a Swiss art museum. Since then, they have wrapped a coast in Sydney Australia with one million square feet of fabric, a valley in Rifle, Colorado, surrounded islands in Biscayne Bay, Miami with bright pink fabric, and the Riechstag in Berlin.

The artists accept no sponsors- they are defiantly independent artists, who create defiantly temporary, large scale art that they insist has no agenda other than to delight those who experience it. The proceeds from sales of the design prints of the Gates, and other memorabilia will be used to donate $300,000 to Central Park conservancy and to other conservancies and parks.

All parts of the exhibit are temporary, will have a minimal environmental impact, and all the materials, including 5,290 US Tons of steel and over a hundred thousand square feet of rip-stop nylon fabric, will be recylced after the exhibit is dismantled.

I hope that if you find yourself in the big apple next weekend or the last part of February you will make the trip to Central Park and see this for yourself. I am envious of New York residents who will be able to see it multiple times over that few short 16 days.


The extravagant ephemeral nature of this artwork (and their upcoming project of covering a seven-mile stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado) reminds me that all good things must come to an end, but that in itself is a reason for creation.

Until next Thursday, I remain transiently yours,

Lilith

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