Known for their outsized and revolutionary art projects, the couple’s work is seen again in Florida, New York and Germany.
It was 42 years ago. Miami awoke to a strange, crooked line of hot pink images floating in the waters of panoramic Biscayne Bay.
Eleven small islands had been wrapped in wide, rippling swaths of pink plastic. They were almost glowing as the morning sun swept over the beaches and skyscrapers of the city. Crowds came out in helicopters and speedboats and the family car. Some people perched on condo balconies.
It was the work of Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, the European artists who had wrapped the Reichstag building in Berlin, the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris and run a billowing, tall white nylon fence 24.5 miles over the cattle ranges just north of San Francisco and into the Pacific Ocean.
People flew in from Europe and around the world to see the show, and collectors and museum directors and many others say it lifted the curtain on Miami as a city of natural beauty that would eventually become a dazzling global art center.
“It was a world happening,” said Norman Braman, a former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, a collector and a Miami car dealer with about a dozen brands, from Hyundai to Rolls-Royce.
But it was a tough time for Miami. Cocaine seemed to be everywhere. Gunmen were in the streets. Time magazine had put the city on its cover as “Paradise Lost.” In 1984 — a year after the extravaganza on the bay — the “Miami Vice” TV show took the city’s crime and fashion into American living rooms.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
