By Jarrett Earnest
...These islands (click here) are dark thickets in the gleaming bay. Like “happy little accidents” populating Bob Ross’s landscapes, they’re remnants of a dredging project in the 1920s. Seeds of the invasive Australian pine found their way onto their man-made land and a haphazard ecosystem was formed. Christo and Jeanne-Claude noticed them while crossing the Venetian causeway — which connects the barrier island of Miami Beach to Miami proper — when they visited the area at the end of 1980. Almost immediately, they had an idea: to wreathe 11 of these non-naturally-occurring islands in 6-and-a-half million square feet of a woven tropical pink polypropylene, creating a wide, matlike margin of gently pulsing plastic, appearing for two weeks before being removed without a trace. They went to work, engaging the federal, state, and county’s bureaucratic machinery, creating sketches, hiring engineers, scientists, and lawyers. And they are nothing if not persistent (their 2005 The Gates project in Central Park was 26 years in the making). The effect of their installation in 1983 proved to be profound, remaining deeply embedded in the cultural psyche of a city that has since fashioned itself into a hub for international contemporary art....
...Christo and Jeanne-Claude assembled these archives to be shown in cities where they were developing new pieces, to “sensitize” them to their vision, process, and to show no harm had been done. In the exhibition, you see many of the large-scale preparatory drawings and collages, the sales of which financed the project, along with photographs by Wolfgang Volz from 1980–1983. In the pictures, you see Christo and Jeanne-Claude talking to people — everywhere from committee rooms to shipyards — modeling the elegant pantomime of renaissance painting, alongside the many stages of installation, often from the air....
