What is the official title of the gates of Central Park?
The official title of the work is The Gates: Central Park, New York, 1979–2005, and that 26-year span in the date is no typo.
What happened to “the gates”?
On February 12, 2005, 7,503 orange curtains unfurl across New York City ’s Central Park from thousands of gates. The art installation, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates,” will be gone by the end of the month, but it will leave a lasting impression and be remembered as one of the best-known and most beloved works of site-specific public art.
What's so special about'the gates'?
Like the couple’s previous works, which included wrapping Berlin's Reichstag in cloth and hanging an enormous orange curtain across a Colorado mountain pass, “The Gates” was as conceptually simple as it was logistically challenging.
Why are there saffron gates in national parks?
These saffron gates encouraged visitors to explore the park, take photos, and take new paths through the park. Those paths weren’t just any walking trails: the layout of the installation was designed to ensure that it would only run through areas of the park that had low concentrations of wildlife.
What was the meaning behind The Gates?
Asked often yesterday to explain the meaning of the project, Christo and Jeanne-Claude emphasized that its meaning would have to be found by those who walked through the 7,500 gates, spread over 23 miles of walkways. "It has no purpose," Jeanne-Claude said. "It is not a symbol. It is not a message.
What is the purpose of The Gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude?
This was done for two reasons: to avoid drilling thousands of holes into the soil and potentially harming the root systems of adjacent trees, and because Christo and Jeanne-Claude were inspired by the way the city's pedestrians navigate its paths.
When were The Gates installed in Central Park?
The Gates Central Park, New York City1979–2005 The installation in Central Park was completed with the blooming of the 7,503 fabric panels on February 12, 2005.
Are The Gates in Central Park still there?
From each gate hung a panel of deep saffron-colored nylon fabric....The GatesTypeSite-specific artConditionDismantledLocationCentral Park, New York CityWebsiteThe Gates3 more rows
How long did The Gates stay up in Central Park?
sixteen daysFor sixteen days in 2005 The Gates tempted millions of people to visit Central Park. The 7,500 structures in this epic public artwork – “gates” holding saffron-colored fabric – lined 23 winding miles through the iconic park.
How many gates are in Central Park?
THERE are 20 gates to Central Park, but most people don't even know they exist.
How long did The Gates take to make?
Convincing the proper authorities took another 14 years—and the successful completion of several other projects around the world—but the pair eventually prevailed: On February 12, 2005, Christo and Jeanne-Claude debuted The Gates, a spectacle the likes of which New York had never seen.
What was the running fence trying to draw attention to?
Drawing attention to the ordinary and under-appreciated rural landscape, the fence inspired and provoked a different relationship with the land, emphasising an unrestrained imagination of possibility rather than the arbitrary nature of political and geographical boundaries, alluded to in its title.
Who made The Gates?
Christo and Jeanne‑Cl...ChristoJeanne‑Cl...The Gates/Artists
What is women's Gate Central Park?
Actually almost all did end up as official names, though most weren't carved into the sandstone entrances until the 1990s. Women's Gate is at 72nd Street and Central Park West; Scholars' Gate at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street. A complete list is here.
What is strangers Gate Central Park?
Apr 6 The Strangers' Gate: An Anti-Wall Concept Up near the northwest corner of New York's Central Park, across from the intersection of 106th Street and Central Park West, stands The Strangers' Gate, one of 20 named entrances to the park, which was designed in 1858 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.
What are the different gates of Central Park?
The commissioners suggested a naming system at the Park's four entrances along 59th Street, incorporating four main occupations: Scholars' Gate (at Fifth Avenue), Artists' Gate (at Sixth Avenue), Artisans' Gate (at Seventh Avenue) and Merchants' Gate (at Eighth Avenue).
What is women's Gate Central Park?
Actually almost all did end up as official names, though most weren't carved into the sandstone entrances until the 1990s. Women's Gate is at 72nd Street and Central Park West; Scholars' Gate at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street. A complete list is here.
What is strangers Gate Central Park?
Apr 6 The Strangers' Gate: An Anti-Wall Concept Up near the northwest corner of New York's Central Park, across from the intersection of 106th Street and Central Park West, stands The Strangers' Gate, one of 20 named entrances to the park, which was designed in 1858 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.
Where are the entrances to Central Park?
You'll find 23 entrances spanning the Upper West Side along Central Park West between 63rd and 110th Streets. There are four additional entrances at the north end of the park along 110th Street, in the neighborhoods of Morningside Heights and Harlem on the west side and East Harlem on the east side.
How was Central Park designed?
Olmsted and Vaux designed Central Park to incorporate a variety of landscapes and experiences. Its 843 acres included sweeping lawns, picturesque woodlands, meandering streams, and broad lakes, all experienced by moving through the Park along winding paths, a carriage drive, and a bridle path.
How many people were there to install the gates in Central Park?
It took over eight hundred workers to install the thousands of 16-foot-high gates, hung with cloth panels, which straddled 23 miles of Central Park’s pathways and transformed the park into a unique, ephemeral work of art.
When was the Gates project started?
Husband-and-wife artistic duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude first conceived of the project in 1979. The city rejected their proposal in 1981, but, as the artists later stated, the arduous process of getting approval for such a massive installation on city property was itself an artistic performance. “He adds a dimension to the work, no matter what he thinks,” Christo said of the parks commissioner who first rejected “The Gates.” After years of negotiating and resistance from the denizens of the Upper West Side, construction began in 2004 and Mayor Michael Bloomberg unfurled the first curtain on the morning of February 12, 2005.
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How many people were involved in the installation of the Gates?
It took over eight hundred workers to install the thousands of 16-foot-high gates, hung with cloth panels, which straddled 23 miles of Central Park’s pathways and transformed the park into a unique, ephemeral work of art.
When did the orange curtains in Central Park go away?
The art installation, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates,” will be gone by the end of the month, but it will leave a lasting impression and be remembered as one of the best-known and most beloved works of site-specific public art.
When was the curtain on the Upper West Side opened?
After years of negotiating and resistance from the denizens of the Upper West Side, construction began in 2004 and Mayor Michael Bloomberg unfurled the first curtain on the morning of February 12, 2005.
Who was the host of The Gates?
Despite initial complaints from prominent locals like late-night host David Letterman, tourists flocked to see “The Gates” and most in the art world considered it an unmitigated success.
When was the Gates art exhibit in Central Park?
Brilliant orange squares line the walkways of New York City’s Central Park in this Ikonos image. Taken on February 12, 2005, the image marks the opening day of The Gates art exhibit. The exhibit was created by Christo and Jeanne-Claude and features 7,500 gates draped with saffron-colored fabric panels. The gates straddle 23 miles of walkways that meander through Central Park, providing an airy golden colonnade to visitors. From space, the gates look more like marquee lights or an exquisite array of orange dominoes stacked in graceful curves through the park.
How much steel is used in the Gates exhibit?
The scale of this exhibit is astonishing: 99,155 square meters of saffron-colored fabric, 96.5 kilometers of vinyl tube, and 4,799 metric tons of steel (equivalent to 2/3 of the steel used in the Eiffel Tower) make up The Gates. About 700 workers were needed to assemble the exhibit in the week prior to its opening. All of the material used in the project will be recycled after the exhibit is taken down on February 28.
How many gates are there in Central Park?
S o what, exactly, is The Gates? Well, literally, it’s exactly that: 7,500 gates that will frame the pathways of Central Park for sixteen days next month. Each of the gates is sixteen feet high, secured to a heavy metal base and trailing a swath of bright saffron-colored fabric, all of which, together in the wind, will create a shimmering river of color. The official title of the work is The Gates: Central Park, New York, 1979–2005, and that 26-year span in the date is no typo. It represents the exact length of time it’s taken them to persuade New York City officials to let this enormously ambitious, logistically staggering, and—by the artists’ own admission—gleefully pointless project come to life. They’ve attended meetings, consultations, and public hearings during two decades: The couple made 41 formal presentations to civic officials and community leaders in 1980 alone. They’ve endured feasibility reports, petitions, angry letters of protest, and a 251-page official refusal, issued 23 years ago.
When did the Christos plan Central Park?
Their plan for a New York project lay dormant until 1979, when they turned their eyes to Central Park. The Christos envisioned a project that would reflect the city’s peripatetic culture while complementing Frederick Law Olmsted’s masterful landscaping.
What is the artist called in The Gates?
The Gates has taken so long to come to fruition, in fact, that when it was first proposed, its artist had only one name: Christo. Now the artist is called Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
How many gates were there at the Christos?
The Christos revised their proposal to address the city’s concerns. The number of gates was reduced to 7,500, and the event was scheduled for February, traditionally a quiet month in the park.
How many holes did the Christos dig in Central Park?
But three factors are repeatedly invoked: 1) the restoration of Central Park; 2) the election of Michael Bloomberg as mayor; and 3) the small matter of the 30,000 holes the Christos once hoped to dig in Central Park. The Christos have called New York home since 1964, having moved here from Paris, drawn by the art scene.
What are the Christos known for?
To the public, the Christos are popularly known, much to their frustration, as “the wrapping artists” or, even more colloquially, as “the guy who wraps things.” This is mostly a result of their most widely publicized work to date, Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971–1995, an installation that involved wrapping the entire German Parliament building in silvery fabric, so that it looked like an enormous wedding cake. But many of their other works, they point out, have nothing to do with wrapping. The Umbrellas, for instance, consisted of 3,100 umbrellas, planted across 30 miles of countryside in California and Japan. Or Running Fence, a 1976 work for which they erected a 241⁄2-mile, eighteen-foot-high fence of rippling white fabric that snaked across Sonoma and Marin counties in California, then disappeared into the ocean.
Who was the art manager at the Leo Castelli dinner?
Ivan Karp , an art manager for Leo Castelli at the time, called the dinners “an ongoing scandal” and said of Jeanne-Claude, “I didn’t want to be in the same room with her.”. As art critic David Bourdon recalled, “People were contemptuous of them. They were perceived as being very pushy.
How long were the gates in Central Park?
Nearly thirty years after the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude first conceived of The Gates, this logistically complex project was finally realized over a period of two weeks in New York’s Central Park. Each gate, a rectilinear three-sided rigid vinyl frame resting on two steel footings, supported saffron-colored fabric panels that hung loosely from the top. The gates themselves matched the brilliant color of the fabric. The statistics are impressive: 7,503 gates ran over 23 miles of walkways; each gate was 16 feet high, with widths varying according to the paths’ width. Despite a brief exhibition period—February 12th through 27th 2005— The Gates remains a complex testament to two controversial topics in contemporary art: how to create meaningful public art and how art responds to and impacts our relationship with the built environment.
Who designed the Gates?
The Gates respond to spaces designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux within the dense urban grid of Manhattan. The artists complicate an environment that was, in fact, entirely invented in the mid-19th century to express the Victorian ideal of the pastoral and picturesque landscape.
How much did the Gates project cost?
Bureaucratic collaborators. The Gates cost 21 million dollars and both the artists and the supporting institutions (the City of New York and the Central Park Conservancy) were quick to emphasize that Christo and Jeanne-Claude financed the project themselves and that the installation was free to the public.
When did Christo and Jeanne-Claude write The Gates?
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Gates, 1979-2005, © 2005 Christo and Jeanne-Claude
What is the installation in the park?
This installation alters the experience of seeing and walking along the paths that run throughout the park. The title alludes to a threshold, a point of exit and entrance. In fact, in some places, the structures form an oval. There is no starting point and no end point and moreover, no favored point from which to view the work. It is an installation made for the pedestrian in motion and not a static object that asks us to stand still before it.
What is a path cut into a pristine natural environment?
A path cut into a pristine natural environment is very much an intervention , as evidenced in Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking, 1967 and Walter De Maria’s One Mile Long Drawing, 1969.
Is Central Park an urban oasis?
However Central Park, a much-loved urban oasis, is one of the most famous examples of urban planning. The Gates reinforce and highlight pre-existing routes within this manmade environment. Critiques of The Gates that are rooted in the issue of the artwork’s relationship with nature are therefore curious since the Park itself is not an untouched natural space.
Why was Central Park built?
According to the history of central park, its initial purpose was to allow urban dwellers a chance to interact with fellow New Yorkers and nature while escaping urban life stresses. It was meant to give them the experience of being in the countryside without ever having to leave the heart of the city.
Who designed Central Park?
Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park. It is seen as an iconic piece of landscape architecture and has influenced the development of other parks nationwide. According to Central Park history, it is a Scenic Landscape of the City of New York (1974) and was declared a National Historic Landscape in 1963.
What is Central Park?
Central Park New York, is one of the most popular destinations in the city. It is also one of the country's most frequently visited parks. It is so famous and popular that businesses that surround the park proudly boast that they are “steps from Central Park”, like the famed breakfast restaurant Norma’s at the Parker Hotel known as an elegant New ...
When was Central Park Conservancy formed?
A group of citizens in partnership with the city formed the Central Park Conservancy after a period when the park was going through extreme deterioration in the 1960s.
How many trees are there in Central Park?
Central Park also provides significant benefits to the cities environment and ecology in addition to different recreational aspects. The park has more than 18,000 trees that help clean and cool the cities air, and its well-positioned acreage at the city center provides wildlife with a habitat.
How many people worked on Central Park?
The building of Central Park was one of nineteenth-century New York’s most massive public works projects. Some 20,000 workers–Yankee engineers, Irish laborers, German gardeners, and native-born stonecutters–reshaped the site’s topography to create the pastoral landscape.
Who was the leader of the Central Park Conservancy?
From 1980 to 1996, the Central Park Conservancy was led by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, ...
What are some examples of rules governing park use?
Stringent rules governing park use–for example, a ban on group picnics–discouraged many German and Irish New Yorkers from visiting the park in its first decade.
How much soil was planted at the Battle of Gettysburg?
After blasting out rocky ridges with more gunpowder than was later fired at the Battle of Gettysburg, workers moved nearly 3 million cubic yards of soil and planted more than 270,000 trees and shrubs. The city also built the curvilinear reservoir immediately north of an existing rectangular receiving reservoir.
How many playgrounds did Moses build?
With the assistance of federal money during the Depression, Moses built 20 playgrounds on the park’s periphery, renovated the Zoo, realigned the drives to accommodate automobiles, added athletic fields to the North Meadow, and expanded recreational programming.
How many poor people lived in Seneca Village?
Creating the park, however, required displacing roughly 1,600 poor residents, including Irish pig farmers and German gardeners, who lived in shanties on the site. At Eighth Avenue and 82nd Street, Seneca Village had been one of the city’s most stable African-American settlements, with three churches and a school.
How many acres of land was acquired by the City of New York in 1853?
After three years of debate over the park site and cost, in 1853 the state legislature authorized the City of New York to use the power of eminent domain to acquire more than 700 acres of land in the center of Manhattan.
