Saffron Colored Days
The project took almost a quarter of a century to be realized. A true dream come true for the artist couple of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. She is Bulgarian, he is French and they mey when her mother sat for a portrait for him. Many years later, their collaborative masterpieces include building a wall of cloth along California's Marin County coastline, dotting the hillsides of Japan and California with blue or yellow umbrellas, wrapping the grand edifice of the Reichstag in Berlin, wrapping the Pont Neuf in France and surrounding the Biscayne Bay islands in floating pink, and wrapped the trees in Switzerland.
The Gates is what they call sprinkling the vast expanse of Central Park's 23,000 miles of footpaths with bright orange archs of vinyl panels. In all, 7,500 gates measuring 16 feet high snaked its way around the park and the trails are visible since the trees were still in their winter get-up, empty branches reaching the sky with saffron curtains beneath it billowing in the wind.
The exhibit opened on the morning of Saturday, February 12th. Although my friend and I walked to Central Park early to beat the crowd, we also arrived before the fabrics could all be unfurled. And the plan to beat the crowd? Seems that was the plan too for a few hundred tourists and New Yorkers. And so we returned on a perfect Sunday morning - bright and sunny albeit a bit nippy (30 degrees plus wind chill factor). This time, the exhibit was as how it was promised by the artists, a unique exhibition of orange in the midst of green and brown.
Walking from 96th Street, we could already see the fabrics flapping and flirting with the wind from Madison Avenue. The area near the Reservoir was not crowded, there was plenty of opportunity to take pictures without being crowded. The closer we got to the south end of the park, however, the more the people converged, enjoying the free 16-day exhibit and the weather.
We walked the east side of the park , stopping a while near the Bethesda Fountain circle, the length of the Mall and viewed the Wollman Rink from the top of the hill and everywhere we looked it was square arches of flags of bright orange. It danced with the breeze and played with our view of the morning sun. The trails marched left and right and we were surrounded, almost embraced.
The exhibit is free, runs for only 16 days and is not funded by anyone nor any foundation. All expenses were shouldered by the artists, estimated at $26 million. The artists will sell prints that Christo had made of the exhibit through their website and this is how they cover the expenses.
This is my favorite weekend so far this year, waking up to saffron colored days.