Displaying items by tag: christo

How did Pablo Picasso celebrate his 80th birthday? Thanks to recent efforts by the Associated Press and British Movietone to make their newsreel archives more accessible to the public, we can now witness snippets of the occasion. The two companies announced a project to upload over one million minutes of digitized film footage to YouTube, comprising over 550,000 videos dating as far back as 1895. There are plenty of art-related clips to explore — watch New Yorkers in 1995 react to Christian Boltanski’s “LOST: New York Projects” in the subway or see Christo and Jeanne-Claude unwrap the Reichstag — but one of the greatest gems is the documentation of Picasso’s birthday.

One of Italy’s lesser-known lakes (without American movie stars to stalk) is likely to become considerably more famous after the wrap artist Christo has his way with it. For just over two weeks, in June 2016, floating walkways lined with bright yellow fabric will create a walkway around Lake Iseo, in the Lombardy region, joining the mainland to the lake islands. The fabric will continue on pedestrian streets in two mainland towns.

Visitors will be able to walk on the work, atop some 200,000 fabric-lined floatable cubes stretching for almost two miles, but it was also designed to be seen from the mountains above.

A plan by internationally-renowned artist Christo to hang miles of fabric over the Arkansas River is moving forward.

United States District Judge William Martinez ruled Friday that the Bureau of Land Management did not violate federal law in its November 2011 approval of the artist's Over The River project.

Opposition group Rags Over the Arkansas River (ROAR) claimed that the BLM's decision violated the Federal Land Policy and Management Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

Bulgarian-born artist, Christo, is best known for his large-scale artworks that transform their environments. Working with his late wife, Jeanne-Claude, Christo draped Berlin’s parliament building, the Reichstag, in metallic-colored fabric (1995); completely wrapped Paris’ oldest bridge, the Pont Neuf, in 450,000-square-feet of golden material (1985); and surrounded 11 islands in Florida’s Biscayne Bay in pink fabric (1983).

The artist’s next endeavor is expected to be the world’s biggest permanent sculpture and will cost approximately $340 million, making it the most expensive as well. The structure, which will be built in the desert of Al Gharbia, 100 miles from Abu Dhabi, is a flat-topped pyramid that will stand 492 feet tall. The sculpture, titled The Mastaba, will be made out of 410,000 oil barrels painted in various colors inspired by the yellow and red sands of the desert, which will create the effect of an Islamic mosaic.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude conceived the idea for The Mastaba over 30 years ago, but were derailed by the Iran-Iraq war, among other things. Working with Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the representative of Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, Christo financed the project through sales of his own works and funds from various investors.

The Mastaba, which will take about 30 months to complete, will be Jean-Claude and Christo’s only permanent large-scale work.

Known for his massive environmental works of art that interact with the natural landscape, the Bulgarian artist, Christo (b. 1935), has been ordered by a federal judge to halt the installation of his latest project until a lawsuit involving the work reaches a conclusion.

Created by Christo and his late wife, Jeanne-Claude (they worked collaboratively under the moniker Christo), Over the River involves hanging long stretches of translucent fabric for two weeks above various parts of the Arkansas River in Colorado. Girded by steel cables that will be anchored on either bank, the project will consume almost seven miles of the river.

The environmentalist group Rags Over the Arkansas River Inc. (ROAR) brought the lawsuit against Christo as they fear the project will affect local fisheries and natural habitats and disturb the locals. Although the Bureau of Land Management approved the project in 2011, Christo will serve as a co-defendant alongside the Bureau in order to uphold his and Jeanne-Claude’s vision.

The couple’s iconic body of work includes The Gates, which was installed in New York City’s Central Park in 2005, and Running Fence, a 24 mile-long artwork that ran through California’s Sonoma and Marin counties in 1976. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects often stirred up controversy based on their sheer scale, but it is also this otherworldliness that makes them visually unforgettable.